‘Even the lowliest individual – the least pious, the most deserving of scorn – still possesses one thing to be offered up in service to the Imperium of Man: their life. There is, perhaps, nothing more innately precious than a good death.’
from the Venerable Fr. Zyrnt’s Dying Contemplations
(ca. 200.M39)
It was a rough ride right into the ravenous jaws of death, but the repentant did not baulk at it. She welcomed it. She gloried in it.
The hoarse howling of the Saintly Song’s twin turbines? A delirious choir, breathlessly exhorting her onward to her fate. The tang of oily smoke and fyceline filtering into the ship? A whiff of the paradisiacal, the sweetest scent she could imagine. How she yearned to spill the foe’s blood together with hers! She craved it as a child craved her mother’s embrace.
From the pilot’s compartment came the constant murmur of vox transmissions as Sister Merill coordinated disposition patterns with the flight’s two Thunderbirds. Theirs was the Order of the Charitous Cloak; while nominally a non-militant order composed of hospitallers and other doers of charitable work, it also maintained a small complement of Battle Sisters owing to a centuries-old edict buried somewhere deep in the Ecclesiarchy’s fathomless annals.
‘Enemy ground forces reported converging on sector Delta-E-33,’ Sister Merill’s voice crackled through the micro-bead in the repentant’s ear. ‘We remain on approach vector. Current assessment rates xenos threat at level beta.’
To an outsider’s eyes, it might have appeared wasteful to dedicate an Aquila Lander and two Battle Sisters to delivering a single, sinful soul into battle. Perhaps it was. But tradition demanded no less, and the order held tradition most dear.
That same tradition also demanded that the repentant carry the burden of her weapon. Bound to her right arm by an iron chain, the massive Eviscerator was an unwieldy thing, and rightly so. Its bearer no longer knew grace – why should her blade? Even the ornate High Gothic script embossed down its length made that point: Tristis Necessitas, it declared. Shameful necessity.
Yet awesome though her weapon was, the repentant stood armoured in her faith alone. Her rough-cut, hooded sackcloth cape was a coarse likeness of her order’s sacred namesake. Tradition held that such a cloak was the only garment left to Saint Marthine centuries ago, after she had selflessly shared out her every other possession among a throng of beggared pilgrims on their way to the alpine Shrine of the Highmost Lord on a bitter winter night. Her selflessness had become legend, culminating in the founding of an order dedicated to easing the multitudinous plights of mankind no matter how dark the night.
Assuming the Saint’s exact aspect would have been sacrilege, of course. Hence she was clad also in innumerable lengths of consecrated vellum wrapped around her torso and parts of her limbs, tacked to her scarred flesh by dozens of ritual clavuli. Sequestered in her bare cell, she had spent countless hours meticulously inking every inch of vellum with scriptural passages of censure and admonishment.
Sister Merill’s stoic voice came over the vox again.
‘Hostiles inbound. Brace yourselves.’
Something blew past the lander’s hull with a sound like a long, phlegmy cough, forcing it to bank hard to the left. The repentant leaned into the sudden manoeuvre, holding on to the well-worn grab handle overhead, naked feet planted firmly on the deck. Her mien never changed. What she had not forfeited through her sin were the training, the skills, and the unyielding composure of a Battle Sister.
Opposite her stood her overseer, Blessed Mistress Adalgard, a resplendent presence in her pale red Sororitas power armour. Its gyroscopic stabilisers hummed as they braced her, keeping her bulwarked frame virtually motionless despite the lander’s erratic flight. If the repentant was a ragged cutter at the mercy of the stormy sea, the Sister Superior was a dauntless cliff rising above the raging waves with cold majesty.
Something exploded in a spattering burst close by. The Saintly Song juddered as a thousand tiny metal shards peppered its reinforced hull. Some penetrated and whistled through its interior, ringing off the walls. Blessed Mistress Adalgard’s armour turned several pieces of shrapnel aside; the repentant almost winced when a metal shard ripped across the side of her torso, obliterating a passage from the Book of Contrition. Smoke, noise and cold air began to leak into the ship. She could hear Sister Merill raising her voice on the comms. A tremor ran through the Saintly Song as its nose-mounted heavy bolter spat an opportunistic salvo at some unseen target.
Another dirty engine roar swept past the lander, accompanied by a cannon’s guttural barking. Large-calibre rounds punched through the fuselage. One of the turbines blew out; a crunching, shattering noise came from the cockpit. Warning lights flashed red. A barely stifled cry of pain erupted on the vox. It was the first thing to give the repentant pause since she’d boarded the lander an hour before.
Merill, she thought, unable to keep herself from glancing towards the pilot’s compartment. When she looked back she found Blessed Mistress Adalgard’s stiff stance sagging. A round had gone clean through her abdomen, her back, and the hatch behind her, leaving a gory cavern altogether beyond mending.
Both women looked down at the gaping injury. For one fleeting instant, all was silence.
‘Die well, Repentia,’ Adalgard told her, only the tiniest strain of mortal agony in her voice even then.
‘Blessed Mistress!’
There was a direct hit. An explosion. The Saintly Song lurched violently; flames licked in through the wounds in its hull. The repentant lost her balance at last and was flung into a bulkhead. Before she could even think about regaining her footing the lander spiralled out of control and into a terminal descent. She went tumbling head over heels, flattened first against a wall, then the ceiling, the floor. She caught sight of Adalgard’s armoured form once or twice as it was tossed about like a rag doll, leaving splatters of blood wherever it was hammered against the compartment’s interior surfaces. Cutting through the cacophony, the lander’s remaining engine was working itself into a shrieking, chattering whine.
Then the Saintly Song itself hit something. The repentant met the impact with a scream of outrage.
She limped down the street, dazed and nauseous. She was not sure how she was still drawing breath. On some level, she resented the fact that she did.
The last minute was a blur. Ricocheting off its initial collision site like a deflected hard round, the Saintly Song had spun around her ever more violently, flinging and smashing her against the compartment walls until everything blurred into a single, continuous application of unrelenting kinetic force that left her unable to think or breathe.
Then, suddenly, cool air. The lander was gone. Her limbs were free to flail unimpeded for a breathless succession of moments before she hit something hard and at a low angle so that she was sent rolling and tumbling wildly. Her Eviscerator pummelled her as much as whatever solid surface she was careering across until, her momentum spent, she came to rest in a heap.
As soon as she had been able to do more than lie there and groan, she climbed to her feet and got moving. However slow her steps, however painful the effort, she must reach the lander; she must find her Sisters. After all, it was because of her that they had been there in the first place.
The whiff of war she had caught up in the lander was nothing compared to the unfiltered stench that enveloped her down here. Though little structural devastation was evident in her surroundings, the air nonetheless seemed almost solid with the mingled stenches of cinder-dry smoke, melted plastek, and pulverised rockcrete. Something disturbingly warm trickled from her nostrils and across her upper lip.
‘Though black the air and hot the flame,’ the repentant gasped, trying to find solace in Piacula 189:17, ‘though sore my flesh and short my breath: there is yet hope, there is yet life, while I extol our Father’s name.’
A few dozen metres away lay the mangled wreckage of the Saintly Song. Its hull was scarred and dented all over, ripped open in several places. One thruster was entirely dead; the other groaned as it wound down, vomiting sparks and oil-black smoke. The portside wing had been shorn clean off and was nowhere to be found. The vessel must have glanced off or ploughed through several more structures on its way down before carving a final, jagged furrow along the ground.
However awful, the sight and the faint hope it inspired lent desperate strength to the repentant’s limbs. She stumbled closer to the ruined lander, the rockcrete gritty and hot under her feet.
The vessel had come to rest on its belly. Its cockpit had ceased to exist, reduced to so much shapeless, crumpled, flattened metal. She swallowed hard, whispered a plea beseeching the Father to look kindly on Sister Merill’s soul, and moved to circle round the crashed craft.
Its starboard hatch was gone. Inside, spilt fuel had caught and set the compartment on fire. The repentant moved as close to the hatch as she dared, shielding her eyes with one arm. Finally she spotted Blessed Mistress Adalgard, lying twisted and lifeless. Flames were engulfing her already. Had the Sister Superior’s power armour remained intact she might have been able to withstand the immense heat for a time, but it had not. Nor would her gruesome injury have been survivable under any but the most ideal of circumstances. Nor would the repentant, lacking any form of armour or protection, have been capable of dragging Adalgard clear of the burning lander.
Nor, nor, nor…
She clenched her fists, digging her nails into her palms until they drew blood. Tears of frustration and anger began to smudge the soot caking her cheeks. All of this because of a pathetic soul who kept bringing death to those around her. Adalgard and Merill’s lives had been senselessly lost because of her. It should’ve been–
A bang, a flash of light, and a wave of pressure made her jump. The floor of the lander’s passenger compartment buckled. Blessed Mistress Adalgard’s body was violently jolted aside. Something like a tiny shooting star whizzed past the repentant, missing her head by inches. The bolt pistol magazines Adalgard had carried were beginning to cook off amid the flames.
All but mewling with distress, fighting the urge to fling herself onto the pyre that was the combusting lander, the repentant backed away from the burning wreck.
Having withdrawn to a safe distance, her benumbed mind feeling more drained than her battered body, she stood watching the sky. Already grey and overcast, it was darkened further by the smoke rising from the burning city. Occasionally an aircraft whizzed past, skimming low, the city’s urban crenellations amplifying its turbine roar until it was like thunder. She spied one or two Imperial fighters, Lightnings in the Tyrian livery of the Nyphon PDF, but most of the craft she saw clearly belonged to the enemy: ungainly machines with garish paint jobs and gratingly loud engines that seemed in no way airworthy. The trails of greasy exhaust they left behind looked like fat worms eating into the fabric of the sky.
She cast about for the order’s two Thunderbirds but caught not a glimpse of them. She hoped that whatever fates the Father had set out for those Battle Sisters were more glorious than being shot down before they could exact divine punishment upon even a single foe.
The repentant slapped herself hard across the mouth. Her freshly split upper lip stung as she admonished herself by reciting verses 78 and 79 from Ad Filiabus Suis, book I, before gritting her teeth and taking stock of her situation. It was perfectly bleak. The crash had left her with more bruises, cuts, and scrapes than she could be bothered to count, though no apparent serious injuries. Her Eviscerator had remained with her; depressing its key-stud for a few moments, she felt a twinge of relief to find its chain mechanism snarling to life unimpeded.
That seemed to be the extent of her good fortune. She carried no provisions: no sustenance, no medical supplies, nothing. A Sister Repentia was not deemed deserving of such luxuries in the field. To boot, she had lost her micro-bead at some point during the crash.
The Saintly Song had come down south of the besieged city’s centre, at one end of a narrow commercial thoroughfare. Littering the flagstones and dusted with ash was the detritus of a headlong evacuation: a lost hat, a broken data-slate, a child’s toy. A lone valet servitor was trudging in a perfect circle, politely murmuring endless requests for instruction.
There were bodies, too. Men and women and children evidently cut down during a strafing run. Yet there were fewer dead than she might have expected. The periodic outflows of toxic vapours from nearby Mount Mordsam had seen great public shelters constructed all around Nyphon centuries ago; these same evacuation protocols should have sent most of the citizenry hurrying to relative safety today as well.
Emperor willing, the savage foe and its mindless fury would pass these places by.
She was on her own. Isolated. Cut off from allied forces. The equipment she could have used to tap into Imperial military communications was lost along with the Saintly Song. Nor had she been taught the cyphers needed to access these encrypted networks. These were need-to-know, and as a lowly Repentia there was very little indeed that she had been deemed in need of knowing.
Prior to embarking, the order’s Battle Sisters had been briefed thoroughly. Not so she. That the bulk of the enemy forces had come down around the city’s central cluster of densely packed, intertwining superspires was the extent of her strategic awareness. That, and the transmission she had overheard earlier on the lander about their moving in on sector Delta-E-33.
It was enough. She was of little importance in this conflict in any case. Nobody depended on a lone Repentia. If she could slay a few stragglers before perishing, that would suffice. She did not pursue tactical objectives, but lived and died by her spiritual strictures alone.
Thus the repentant headed where the billowing smoke of war loomed darkest in the sky. She plodded on through the deserted streets, reverently humming the central motif of Tonière’s Elegēa Peccatorum to herself. Despite everything, she had begun to feel… better. As if her soul itself were somehow lightening. She took it as a sign she was heading in the right direction, and murmured her gratitude for this faintest glimpse of the Emperor’s benevolence.
A few minutes later, she finally found a foe to fight.
Two figures were scrambling down the sloping debris-mound left in the wake of some immense calamity that had befallen a row of hab-towers. One was at best half the size of the other, a human in dirty coveralls, moving with the kind of reckless haste only unthinking terror could breed. The other was proportioned like some simian monster out of a child’s nightmare: too top-heavy, impossibly muscular, its galumphing gait belying the considerable ground it covered with each stride. The dust coating its bestial bulk did not entirely conceal its foul green skin, and even at this distance, she could clearly make out its vicious, tusk-filled sneer.
Then the smaller figure slipped and went tumbling down the slope amid an avalanche of pulverised plascrete. The Ork lumbered after the human, almost looking like it was enjoying itself as it slid across the scree. It even made a show of sheathing its machete-like cleaver as it went. There was no mistaking this chase as being anything more than an amusing diversion for the creature.
A grim smile on her lips, the repentant had already burst into a run. She no longer felt the sting of the abrasions and bruises she’d sustained in the crash, no longer felt the jagged rubble digging into the soles of her feet as she ran along the ruined road. There was a song in her blood now, in her very soul, drowning out all pain and fatigue and sorrow.
The two figures disappeared behind a jumble of ferrocrete slabs to her left. She bounded up their rough incline, sheer fervour lending speed to her limbs and sureness to her step. It was as though everything fell suddenly into place, her path paved by her faith.
Reaching the top of the piled rubble, the repentant lifted her Eviscerator high and leapt. ‘Time to expunge,’ she hissed, eyes aflame with deepest loathing, ‘what passes for your soul!’
The trundling greenskin turned just in time to witness her snarling blade’s righteous descent. It carved deep into its shoulder, severing its right arm amid a spray of gore.
Her bare feet slapped down hard on the ground a moment later. Only just staying upright, she used her momentum to yank the Ork off balance before ripping the Eviscerator free from the massive wound it had inflicted and bringing it circling back around. Its murderous sawteeth shredded the alien’s chest wide open from armpit to armpit; stinking crimson blood gushed from its injuries, drenching her and splashing on the rockcrete around the two of them.
Swaying and stumbling, blood dribbling from its gaping maw amongst punch-drunk curses, the one-armed greenskin pawed frantically at its belt for a weapon, any weapon. But it was much too late for that. Her expression a grimace of fanatical hatred, the repentant growled as she hefted her Eviscerator and brought it down in a brutal overhead swing that left the Ork crumbling to the ground in ragged, dripping pieces.
She was left gasping for breath with more than just exertion. The joy of the kill was an euphoric delight, almost physically titillating; the blood soaking her parchment-bindings and dappling her skin, an ambrosial rain from a heavenly height.
Her lips moved soundlessly in a recitation of Sister Palatine Megera’s Cruentis Affirmationes, though the first verse would have to do. She felt a pang of regret at that. There had been no suffering to speak of on her part.
Yet in her wisdom, the Sister Palatine had foreseen such a predicament as well. She understood that suffering was the essence of devotion, that only a sinner’s blood could wash off her shame. ‘For while, alas, the reprobate might suffer little at times, yet never must she permit herself to suffer not at all,’ as Megera had written.
Leaving bloody footprints in her wake, the repentant stepped away from the slain greenskin to kneel reverently on a patch of unsoiled ground. She rested her Eviscerator across her thighs, its bespattered casing hot to the touch, and angled it such that its teeth pointed up.
The vellum covering her right arm bore no inked script. While less than pristine by now, it remained blank as far as she was concerned. That was her own failing, another shortcoming amongst many – but one easily amended, at least.
She closed her eyes. With a lover’s earnestness, she drew the back of her forearm across one of the Eviscerator’s razor teeth, parting her skin and her flesh as effortlessly as the vellum. She shuddered at her blade’s kiss, at the sweet agony it teased forth. Would that she were entitled to more than this one cut!
When the repentant opened her eyes again, she found the Ork’s would-be victim lingering nearby. The scrawny young woman was perhaps ten years her junior. Her coveralls were grey with the same pulverised rockcrete that dusted her already pale face; its ghostly white hue only made her bandanna-bound red hair stand out that much more.
With an annoyed grunt, the repentant hauled herself to her feet. ‘Where are the others?’ she demanded, surprised by the harsh croak that came out in lieu of her voice.
The girl only stared at her in dazed awe. Her eyes flicked between the butchered greenskin and the hooded, blood-drenched woman who’d slain it.
‘I—’ She coughed to clear her throat. ‘Thank you, Sister—’
‘Do not call me that! Just answer the question.’
‘Uh. The… others?’
‘The enemy. There must have been more. There are always more.’
‘I—’
The girl began shakily wiping dust off her face with a grease-stained rag.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but there was only that… that one. Here, I mean. I saw some more on the way, but—’
‘Where?’
‘Um.’ The girl pointed vaguely. ‘They were headed… east, I think?’ She frowned. ‘Yes. Yes, east. The alarms started up halfway through my shift at the motor-stables in Sallower’s Row. I didn’t think we’d be allowed to leave, but we were.’
She spat out a gob of dust with a little saliva in it.
‘The streets were filled with people heading for the shelters. The closest one was near the Church of the Most Glorious Throne. Or beneath the Collegium Rubricarum, maybe?’
‘You would have been safer there,’ the repentant pointed out and hefted her Eviscerator, preparing to leave.
‘Maybe. I was born down in Runoff Gorge, y’see. In the undercity. Been inside enough cramped spaces to last me the rest of my life. So I decided to go elsewhere.’
The Gorger nodded up the hill-like debris heap she had tumbled down a few minutes before.
‘Home.’
The repentant glanced up the slope.
‘I… used to live here. Level 48, unit 1182.’ The young woman sighed. ‘I just… had a feeling about coming here. Like it was the right thing to do, somehow.’
So did I, the repentant thought.
‘And I suppose I hoped I might get lucky, maybe. Someone has to.’
She lowered her head. Stuffing her hands in her coveralls’ pockets, she kicked despondently at a chunk of rockcrete.
An odd little twinge of emotion made the repentant’s chest tighten. It took her a moment to realise it was pity.
Suddenly the Gorger brightened and turned to beam at her.
‘Oh, praise the Saint! Of course!’ She looked as if she wanted to embrace the repentant. ‘We were both meant to be here! By the Saint’s grace, my life was saved!’
The repentant’s pity soured. For reasons she couldn’t quite put into words, the notion that she’d been meant to save this stranger’s life sat almost insultingly wrong with her.
‘Think, girl. You would not have needed saving if you had not come here in the first place. And do I look like the Saint’s grace shines upon me?’
She gestured at the tattered parchment-bindings sheathing her sinewy form, sullied by dust and soot and blood.
‘I am just a sinner, paying for my trespass. Death is all I deal in now. Our fates are not connected.’
Offering no other farewell than a dismissive glance, the repentant set off eastward.
‘Where are you going?’ the Gorger asked, picking her way across the mound of debris after her.
‘To find the foes you mentioned, and end them.’
‘Oh. Well, you see, I was thinking,’ she said tentatively, ‘that I could stick with you, maybe? You saved my life, and–’
The repentant snorted.
‘I could not protect you even if I wanted to.’ The hard look she gave the girl stopped her in her tracks. ‘Find somewhere to hide. Seek shelter. Truthfully, I do not care. Just leave me be.’
She had barely reached the foot of the huge debris pile when she heard the Gorger crying out behind her. Calling to her in a tone of excitement, maybe even joy.
Hardening her heart, the repentant trudged on.
Solid rounds spanged off the groundcar’s chassis as she dove awkwardly across its bonnet, then huddled against its front tyre. Pain was lancing through her torso. Cracked ribs, at the very least. Her abrasions, bruises, and cuts were too numerous to bother tallying.
At last, in a sprawling municipal vehicle lot, she had come across the greenskins she was hunting. Five of them, three brutes and two runts, gathered around a heavy truck parked just outside a maintenance bay. She neither knew nor cared what they were up to. What mattered was having caught them unawares. With the aid of an auto-pistol she’d found on a crucified PDF trooper along the way, she had fallen upon the greenskins with all the righteous fury she could muster.
There hadn’t been enough of it, the repentant reflected in bitter hindsight. The holy fervour she’d felt before no longer seemed to be upon her. Only four of the foes lay dead. It was as though somewhere along her path, she had left the Saint’s blessing by the wayside. And now that she was about to die, she couldn’t summon to her mind even one of the Martyrs’ Scroll’s 716 death-hymns.
A silent death, then. Unsung in every sense of the word, but hardly undeserved.
She sprang up and across the groundcar’s bonnet, towards the surviving greenskin with its raised gun. For an instant she stared down its sooty muzzle, hyper-aware of its crude rifling, knowing she had no way of reaching her foe in time.
A flash of light engulfed and blinded her. A roar of almost percussive force stopped her dead.
Her foe froze, equally confused. It stood silhouetted in a fourfold glare, and turned around just in time for its gawping face to meet the grill-plate of the oncoming truck.
With a bellowing roar it came ploughing forward, flattening the xenos against its snout and surging on unimpeded. Only just flinging herself aside, the repentant still lay sprawled when a violent impact cut short the roaring engine noise and reduced it to a low, irritated rumbling.
The repentant pulled herself to her feet and limped towards the muttering truck. Its thunderous charge had ended at the wall of a nearby Administratum building, and the greenskin’s burly frame had absorbed most of the impact.
As she got closer it reversed a metre or two, dislodging the mangled greenskin from the impression it had made in the wall. Though vomiting blood and left with more broken bones than intact ones, it tried to rise again.
With another revving roar, the truck burst forward and mashed it into the wall a second time. Whoever sat behind the wheel did not ease off the accelerator, continuing to crush the alien as the vehicle’s skidding, metre-and-a-half-high tyres crunched rockcrete chunks into dust. It was the better part of a minute later that the driver finally backed up and killed the engine.
What was left of the greenskin, now plastered across the wall and the front of the vehicle both, moved no more.
The repentant walked up to the dust-smeared cab, climbed onto the footboard, and peered through the door’s narrow viewport. Hunched in the driver’s seat sat the Gorger girl. Her fingers and knuckles looked bloodless from gripping the steering wheel so tightly. As she slowly turned to look at the woman outside the cab, there were too many emotions in her expression for the repentant to make sense of.
‘That felt good,’ the Gorger whispered.
‘She’ll hold up fine,’ the girl said as she appeared from around the truck’s snout again. ‘These Goliath patterns are built to last.’
Exhausted, the repentant was sitting on the edge of its cargo bed, her Eviscerator across her lap. She turned to give the girl an irritated look.
‘You followed me.’
‘Well. Yes. Carefully, because I didn’t think you’d approve.’
‘And you were right.’
Zipping up her battered toolbag, the Gorger hauled herself up beside her.
‘For the record, I’m not expecting you to thank me,’ she said after a while. ‘For saving your life.’
The repentant said nothing.
‘If anything, I thought you might be mad at me. You said our fates don’t have anything to do with each other. But if I hadn’t followed you…’
‘Perhaps it was my fate to die.’
‘But you didn’t die, so it can’t have been.’
‘That…’ The repentant glanced at her, then turned away with an exasperated shake of her head. ‘That is sophistry.’
The Gorger gave her a blank look.
‘Um. Sure. I still say you were not meant to die.’
They sat in silence. The Gorger produced a slightly squashed ration bar from a pocket and held it out to the repentant. She looked at it, looked away again, accepted it with a reluctant nod, and began to eat almost as hesitantly.
‘What had set you to shouting earlier?’ she finally couldn’t keep herself from asking.
‘Oh, that!’
The Gorger smiled and produced something from another of her coveralls’ many pockets, solemnly presenting it to the repentant. Resting on her grubby palm, glinting faintly in the dreary light, was a small devotional icon. It was evidently handmade and coated in cheap gold paint, depicting a female figure half-wrapped in a cloak. The repentant recognised Saint Marthine at once.
‘I found it again in the middle of all that debris,’ she said, utter joy lighting up her face.
‘This was yours?’
‘Yes! I know it’s mine because of that little bare patch there. I had a small shrine to the Saint in my hab-cell where I kept it. It’s all gone now, of course, except for this! And there isn’t a scratch on it that wasn’t there already!’
The repentant carefully took the little icon and studied it in dubious silence.
‘It could have been destroyed outright, or flung the Emperor knows how far away, or buried underneath all that rubble, and yet…’
‘And yet you just happened to come across it,’ the repentant murmured, ‘against all odds.’ She paused. ‘This is almost—’
‘A miracle, yes!’ the Gorger exulted. ‘And it is! Surely you can see that? Have some faith, Sister!’
‘I told you not to call me that,’ the repentant replied without rancour, absent-minded. She was turning the Saint’s icon over in her hand. It felt at once warm and cool to her touch, and pleasantly so. She swallowed, her throat suddenly tight. It was impossible to avoid feeling that she was not worthy, that the icon should be burning her skin or repelling her in some other way. But it didn’t.
That thought daunted her more than an entire horde of greenskins.
She fell silent, lost in thought, crumpling her ration bar’s empty foil packaging with her other hand.
‘I know you won’t tell me your name,’ the Gorger said after a while, ‘but I can at least tell you mine. So. I’m Elyse.’
The repentant froze.
‘What was that?’ she demanded.
‘Sorry?’
‘Your name.’
‘Elyse,’ she repeated, faltering a little beneath the sudden intensity of the repentant’s gaze. ‘Are you alright?’
‘Yes. No. I…’
She let the foil packaging slip from her hand, even as she clasped the icon of Saint Marthine all the more tightly in the other.
‘Are you alright?’ Elyse asked again.
It took a long time for the repentant to break the silence.
‘My sin was a shot I failed to take.’ Her voice was quiet, flat, hard. It held at once a child’s raw, uncomprehending sorrow and the lingering regret of an old woman, numbed by time and sheer grief. ‘Just a single shot.’
The Gorger looked at her.
‘But it was enough. Someone died because I did not take that shot, someone I… cared about very much.’
‘And…’ Elyse said, falling silent as understanding dawned.
‘Yes. That was her name.’
Neither of them spoke again. The repentant’s eyes were closed. She still clasped the icon of Saint Marthine in one hand; with the other, she traced the words embossed on her weapon before reaching up to feel her ragged cape’s rough fabric, as though reminding herself of what it stood for.
Finally she looked up. Reverently handing the icon back to the Gorger, she nodded at the Goliath’s cab.
‘Let me tell you where we will be heading, Elyse.’
Smashing aside an abandoned groundcar without losing even a little speed, the Goliath left the long, curving sweep of Orbital Ten-Two and thundered onward down the slip road into the urban sprawl east of the city’s centre.
The streets beyond the cab’s narrow viewports tore past, a harsh blur drenched in the smoke-haze of fiery dusk. Elyse sat bent over the steering wheel, gripping it tight and focussing on her driving with unblinking intensity. They were making good time despite all the debris littering the streets, including the wreckage of Imperial and xenos vehicles. Of the greenskins themselves there were only occasional stragglers to be found, the shots they loosed after the speeding Goliath going wide. Twice, the Goliath ran over an errant Ork with a satisfying thwump.
Elyse had assured the repentant that she could take them to the Redoubt. One of the city’s oldest districts, it had been the site of an actual fortress during Nyphon’s earliest days, and housed several alpha-rank military installations today. PDF, Astra Militarum. To the enemy, with its mindless lust for battle, the Redoubt would be like a beacon, a prize, a site of perverse pilgrimage.
Something large and burning came screaming out of the sky, converging on the Goliath’s bearing. A PDF flyer or a greenskin craft, there was no telling. One wingtip brushed the rooftops; the straight line of its descent became a careening tumble, spilling smoke and fire and metal fragments everywhere. Half a second later, the plane’s terminal impact birthed an incandescent blast that altogether annihilated the street ahead of them.
Elyse yelped and wrenched the steering wheel around. The truck slewed, skidding. It avoided the conflagration, barely, all but fishtailing out of control. Somehow she managed to thread it down a cramped side street without adding too many dents to its chassis.
‘Throne,’ she breathed. Strapped securely into the passenger seat, the repentant gave her an approving look.
Elyse smiled back shakily before returning her eyes to the road. Not far ahead, the side street gave out onto an open space. What she glimpsed beyond made her blanch all over again.
‘Throne above!’ she blurted.
They burst at speed out onto one of the long boulevards converging on Immartilas’s Valour maybe a kilometre hence, the towering ouslite memorial that stood guard on the western edge of the Redoubt district. Burning wreckage and broken bodies littered the thoroughfare, the detritus of a fierce battle. An ashen veil of dust, exhaust, and smoke blanketed the boulevard, but it did not reduce visibility enough to conceal the improvised fortifications at the distant memorial’s base, or to smother the flickering gunfire around them.
‘Do I stop?’ Elyse seemed on the edge of her composure.
The repentant’s mind raced as she absorbed the situation ahead. One good look told her there were too many living greenskins, too many dead Imperials. What the invaders lacked in fighting vehicles – she only spied a handful of up-armoured trucks and light tanks, clearly cobbled together from scrap – they made up for with numbers and their infamously unthinking savagery.
‘Keep going.’
‘We won’t get shot at by our own people, will we? They don’t know we’re coming.’
‘No, they do not. We must chance it.’
The Gorger nodded. Few of the aliens were lingering this far from the battle. Complacent or especially stupid, they paid little attention to their surroundings. One bounced hard off the Goliath’s right front wing. Shortly afterwards, a pack of greenskin runts became meat-paste smeared across the rockcrete.
What enemy gunfire the truck was starting to draw dealt only superficial damage. The vast bulk of Immartilas’s Valour, pockmarked with impact craters, shell holes, and burn marks, filled all of its front viewports now.
Then something not quite as large, but much closer, loomed out of the wafting smoke ahead.
Trudging amidst the greenskins assaulting the fortifications was a brute half again as big as the others, bawling what might have been orders as it went. Plates of crudely beaten metal armoured parts of its hulking frame. One pillar-thick arm was sheathed in iron latticework, ending in a brutal-looking, mechanised claw.
‘What’s that?’ Elyse asked. ‘The huge one? Is it some kind of… officer? A leader?’
‘I believe so,’ the repentant allowed. ‘The more battles these creatures survive, the more they grow in size and preeminence. Their lesser kind flock and hearken to them.’
Having steered the Goliath away from the huge Ork, Elyse now gave it a dark look.
‘So killing it will stop their assault?’
‘It might. But—’
The truck’s tyres squealed as it veered onto a collision course with the greenskin obliviously goading its mob onward.
‘These things need to die,’ Elyse hissed, angrily slamming the truck into a higher gear. ‘You saw what they’ve done to the city. To my home!’
The repentant knew that look of burning fervour in her eyes, and she was startled to find she did not like seeing it there.
‘Turn the truck aside. Make for the memorial.’
‘But we’re here now! By the Saint’s grace! We’ll be fine!’
Elyse put the pedal to the metal.
‘Trust me. I told you these patterns are built to last.’
‘Don’t!’
An instant before the Goliath struck the greenskin, it finally swung around. Caught off its guard, all it could do was brace its armoured limb to meet the truck bearing down on it. Metal met metal, shrilly screeching. Something snapped with a sound like bones breaking, and the horizon outside the truck’s viewports tilted, rolled, inverted.
For the second time that day, the repentant was lost in a maelstrom of noise and fury.
When the world came back into focus she found herself upside down, still strapped in tight. Elyse lay limp on what used to be the cab’s ceiling, bleeding from a head wound. Outside the battle raged on, the Orks’ makeshift shooters all but drowning out the more sophisticated Imperial weapons.
Something struck the Goliath hard, jolting the massive vehicle. Amid the din outside the repentant heard the deep, aggravated panting of some particularly large, injured beast.
There was another jolt. Then the truck started to tilt again. Some daunting effort of strength was levering it back upright. She fumbled for the connectors of the seat-straps holding her in place, grunting as her Eviscerator got in the way. She was just beginning to make progress when the Goliath thumped back down on its tyres with a groan of complaining metal, half depositing Elyse’s body on her lap in the process.
Somehow she managed to manoeuvre the girl back into the driver’s seat, finally got her straps to retract a second later. The door on her side wouldn’t yield until she put her bloodied foot into it, kicking and kicking again until it burst open and she plunged a metre and a half onto the rockcrete.
She had found the war at last. From her first gasping breath outside the Goliath, it threatened to suffocate her, as murderous as a furnace raging out of control. It enveloped her in the spilt-guts stink of death, in the choking, reeking heat of indiscriminate ruin.
The remains of countless Guardsmen and PDF troopers lay all around, burnt or maimed or blown apart; hacked into pieces by cleavers and machetes, or crushed into chunky organic sludge beneath the treads of the greenskins’ battle-conveyances. An overturned Centaur lay ablaze, gouting smoke.
None of them had died easy. They had fought to the last defending the Imperial fortifications, less than a hundred metres distant here. Composed of makeshift rockcrete barriers and a roadblock of heavy vehicles, these seemed still to be holding for now. Yet what reached the repentant’s ears of the defenders’ shouting was telling in its tone and volume, or the lack thereof. Pouring relentless gunfire into the Imperial line, suppressing what defenders they didn’t kill outright, the advancing Orks were mere minutes from overwhelming the fortifications.
The huge greenskin came lumbering round the Goliath’s battered front. Its augmented arm had absorbed the brunt of the impact and dangled limply by its side, the latticework shattered, the great mechanised claw spasmodically crunching shut. As she had feared, the alien was not dead just yet.
But then, neither was she.
When several of its lesser ilk came eagerly tromping closer with their weapons raised, it flung up its good arm and bellowed, glaring at them, warning them off. Perhaps it would lose face if it didn’t kill her itself; perhaps it simply meant for this bit of sport to be all its own.
And kill her it very soon would, she knew. It hadn’t even drawn the spiked club tucked into its belt or its oversized, stubby-snouted pistol; one swipe of its huge hand would shatter her bones like kindling, one tug deprive her of a limb. Both of them might be injured, but even though the greenskin had been hit by a truck the repentant could not begin to match its endurance or strength.
Ignoring the piercing pain in her ribs, she dragged herself upright. The last few shreds of once-immaculate vellum slipped off her battered form as she stood swaying on her feet. Only her sackcloth cape remained, leaving her no less bare than Saint Marthine herself had stood on that hallowed night long ago.
But it no longer felt conceited or sacrilegious to wear the saint’s aspect. She had finally realised what everything had been building to that day, what purpose her trials had served. She now knew whose example she must follow.
Putting the Goliath between herself and the greenskin, she unwound the iron chain binding the Eviscerator to her arm. There was nothing impious to this act, either; it was the rightful shedding of a burden she need bear no longer.
She clambered up the truck’s chassis to stand upon its roof. Not quite at eye level with her foe even now, she nevertheless felt far from intimidated. If anything, for the first time since she had become Repentia, she felt at peace.
There were a thousand psalms she might have intoned then, but she had no need of them any longer. Her Eviscerator would speak for her. It revved angrily, catching the Ork’s attention. Even as it straightened up and turned, she raised her weapon and leapt.
The huge greenskin snatched her from the air easily, clutching her entire torso in its monstrous fist. With its hideous, scarred visage less than a metre from her own, the Ork howled its wrath at her.
She responded with her own scream of defiance, and plunged her raging Eviscerator down that gaping maw.
Its hateful roar became gurgling, rattling, choking, gagging, the weapon’s buzz-saw snarl all but lost amid that mortal cacophony. Yet the clearest sound was the brittle snapping as the greenskin’s spasming fist crushed her ribs and spine. A moment later it dropped her to claw at its shredding throat, but the damage was done.
It staggered backwards. Frothy blood fountained from its upturned maw as the Eviscerator chewed its way down its neck. Within moments the oversized chainsword had disappeared from sight inside the Ork’s bulk, burrowing into its innards and excavating a wealth of gore.
It teetered a little while longer, retching up blood and chunks of viscera, before keeling over and hitting the ground with earth-shaking force.
The giant greenskin’s demise at the hands of the lone human threw its mob into turmoil. They reeled back, cursing and howling. However heretical the notion, one might even have detected a note of unsettlingly human outrage in their uproar.
Their sudden dismay allowed the Imperial forces to rally. What had been a trickle of return fire from the fortifications swelled, and kept swelling. Troops that had lain hugging makeshift cover in the shadow of Immartilas’s Valour now rose, aimed, fired. Their barrage lashed into the Orks, dropping some outright and driving the rest back. The massed zap-crack of las-bolts became a wild staccato, soon underlined by the percussive chatter of crew-served weapons. Scarcely a shot was fired in response by the aliens. All they did was panic, and flee, and die.
Elyse paid little heed to any of it. She had dragged herself free of the Goliath truck in time to watch her saviour fell the Ork, and fall in turn. Keeping her head down she began to stumble forward, dragging a leg lamed by a ruined ankle. A few metres from the immense corpse of the huge greenskin, its executioner lay tiny and unmoving.
Kneeling, she found the dying woman’s eyes open, looking up at the sky. But they did not stare blindly; there was a tiny, wet glimmer of life in them yet.
‘I’m sorry!’ she whispered, faltering. ‘I didn’t… I shouldn’t have…’
The Sister’s gaze met hers. Peaceful, untroubled, it seemed to say: Do not worry about me. All is well.
Elyse sniffed. Surely nothing could be further from the truth. Fresh blood was welling from torn skin in a dozen places where bone had broken through. She was not sure how the woman was still alive. Giving in to the powerful urge to do something, anything, she produced her icon of Saint Marthine and placed it in the Sister’s hand, gently closing her fingers around it.
She knew she should be trying to catch the attention of the nearby soldiers, to go run yelling for a medicae; but she felt that her place was here by the dying woman’s side, at the end.
‘Does… does it hurt, Sister?’ she asked, feeling stupid even as the question left her lips.
There was the hint of a good-natured rebuke in the faint smile that answered her.
‘No.’
Elyse truly believed her. It wasn’t her agony being so great as to be beyond words, she sensed. This woman genuinely knew no pain. Not anymore.
‘That’s good,’ Elyse managed to reply.
‘Yes.’
Around her crumpled torso, blood was pooling on the rockcrete.
‘Is there…’ Elyse began, unable to stop herself asking another stupid question, ‘is there anything I can do for you?’
With an effort, the Sister turned her head to take her in. Each slow breath was an effort now, but her eyes were very clear.
‘Will you survive?’ she asked.
Elyse looked around. Soldiers attired variously in the livery of the PDF and the uniform flak of the Astra Militarum were fanning out from the fortifications, securing the area, finishing off the remaining greenskins. A pair of Chimeras had emerged from the memorial’s colossal shadow and laid down punishing bursts from their heavy bolters as they advanced.
The battle was won. She was safe. But she knew that wasn’t what the Sister had meant.
Silent, Elyse held her eyes with her own. Her gaze was calm and steady; she wished she felt half as strong as the dying woman looked.
‘Yes,’ she made herself say.
‘That’s good, Elyse,’ the Sister replied, a gentle smile in her fading voice.
Heavy footsteps trod closer. Elyse looked up at the figure in power armour looming over them. Ash and rockcrete dust stained its pale red ceramite; scarcely a spot on the heavy battle-plate was left unmarred by deep scratches or impact dents.
The Battle Sister wore no helmet. Her dark hair hung lank with sweat. A fresh cut, bleeding freely, bisected the fleur-de-lis tattooed on her left cheek. Wisps of smoke still drifted from the muzzle of her boltgun.
She scowled at the huge Ork cadaver, noted the bloody hilt of the massive chainsword protruding from its guts. Her grim expression softened a fraction when she laid eyes on her fallen sister-in-arms.
When Elyse turned to her saviour again, she was gone.
‘May the Emperor’s forgiveness be hers,’ the Battle Sister intoned.
Her eyes were closed. In death, her mien had relaxed into an expression of such serenity that Elyse choked with mingled awe and sorrow. Whatever transgression had caused this Sister to become Repentia, whatever terrible deed she believed she must atone for, haunted her no longer.
Her last smile was that of one convinced that she had died better than she had lived.
