The Emperor's Legion (Watchers of the Throne #1) - Chris Wraight Page 0,27

crushing me to death.

I was losing consciousness. I screwed my eyes closed, gathered all my remaining strength, and pushed upwards. Its vox-grille shattered, and I propelled my blade up into its cranium. For a moment longer it clutched at me, hissing bloody spittle, and then the terrible pressure finally fell away.

It collapsed, crashing into a heap of armour-plates, gauntlets falling limp. I dropped to my knees on top of it, hauling breaths into my crushed lungs, barely able to see for the spinning stars crowding my vision.

I clawed my way across its breastplate, back towards the opening at its neck. I ripped the helm from its head, and gazed on the monster. Its flesh was white, like gristle. Its eyes were bloodshot and swollen, its black tongue lolling from pierced lips. Its last expression was one of derangement and agony, which gave me some measure of fierce recompense.

I took my own helm off to look at it unfiltered. Then I hawked up a gobbet and spat into its unseeing eyes.

For my sisters, I told it, silently.

I would have liked to mourn for longer, to immolate the bodies with the proper rites, but I knew time was already short. The entire grid-sector had been ruined in the attack, but soon reinforcements would arrive from elsewhere on the planet, looking for a reason for the attack and digging down to its epicentre. That would bring unwelcome eyes to what remained of the convent, potentially undoing all we had built in secrecy.

I got up from the corpse of the monster. The command nexus, an arched chamber placed like a crypt at the base of an old nave, had been thoroughly smashed. Bodies littered the cracked floor. Many were out of armour, perhaps dragged from their meditations or studies. One by one, I saw the faces I knew, all battered and lifeless.

I limped through the nexus and into the network of chambers beyond. The raiders had torched the archives, and the data coils were still acrid and smoking. The armoury was empty, its contents either destroyed or looted. We did not have our own chapels, only the sham ones in the levels above, but our private cells where we trained and rested were ransacked.

All were dead. The raiders had not come to seize anything, simply to destroy. Somehow, despite all our efforts, they had found out where we were based, and assembled a force strong enough to nullify our defences and gut our citadel.

That thought alone troubled me greatly. Our order was clandestine, but we were not undefended. The lower halls were shielded and augur-resistant. We had heavy weapons and the crew to handle them. Any one of my sisters had been trained to fight the greatest dangers of the Imperium, and on their own ground were more than a match for those that had come after them.

The fact that there were no bodies of the Enemy did not mean that many had not died in the assault. Aside from the crippled one they had left behind, there was evidence of other casualties having been taken away, dragged heavily along the ground for retrieval of armour and gene-seed. It was almost unheard of, even in those straitened times, for a sizeable band of such warriors to assault a world like Arraissa. There must have been so many monsters here, acting in such brutal, concentrated force.

Perhaps that was the true reason they had left one behind – as a marker of things to come, to let the citizens of the Imperium know just what was now stalking them.

My rage still burned as I kicked through the remnants, partly directed against myself. Perhaps it had been unwise to leave for Hellion, I thought, despite the fact there had been no warning. Would my presence have changed anything? Probably not. I might have downed one, maybe two, but it was clear that the battle had been horribly one-sided. My ignorance of the coming attack was what had saved my life.

It was both the great strength and the great weakness of our kind, that we had no ready access to the warp. Our counterparts in the Adeptus Astartes employed the services of Librarians and the finest astropaths, seers and mystics, and thus could often detect threats before they arose. We, on the other hand, were blind to that aspect of the universe. Our own Navigators and astropaths were stunted things, barely able to operate in our presence, and thus we had no means of scrying the paths of