Explosions and gouts of eldritch purple plasma rent the pre-dawn air. Huddled in the ruined promenade that formed their assembly area, Shoun of the Adepta Sororitas watched the fires above tinge the world in hues of violet.
The traitors held up in the Basilica of Takeshi were the last bastion of the insurgency on Miike's World. Today, Shoun and her sisters would lead the final assault. Shoun judged by the intensity of the fire that the traitors were aware of the imminent attack. From its inaccuracy she concluded they did not know their exact position. She stroked the chaplet ecclesiasticus that hung around her neck, and considered this a blessing from the Emperor.
More thunderous crashes of ordnance reverberated through the shattered city. Though a veteran of many battles, Shoun still felt intensely nervous. The hours of waiting were always difficult. When combat began it would bring other concerns, but at least it would purge the suffocating tension she felt now.
Soon, the intimidating but ineffective banging from the enemy lines was joined by a mighty roar from behind. Their own artillery had begun their preparatory bombardment. It was simple to note, but joyous to watch and almost intolerable in its volume.
Shoun checked her time-piece. Not long now. To calm her raging nerves she prayed to the Emperor once more, and thought of the peace of her convent.
Shoun supposed that there were not many military organisations in the galaxy where you would be granted an audience with your general. The Adepta Sororitas, however, had always been a mix of military and religious traditions. Emperor only knew how their Canoness found time among her myriad other duties to personally tend to each sister's spiritual development, but somehow she did.
Nerves singing in anticipation, Shoun rang the small bell to announce herself and entered the chamber. Canoness Ekaterina sat on the other side of the small room. She wore a simple raiment, with no badges of rank or office. Though her hair was grey and her face lined, there was no deference to her years in either her austere surroundings or her poise. She took a sip of tea, one of the few indulgences she permitted herself, and gestured for Shoun to sit in front of her.
After the customary observances were made, Shoun sat, and took a deep breath. She felt, as usual, that her questions were silly. Would her Canoness scold her? She could be a harsh mother sometimes, or as gentle as though tending a newborn lamb, depending on what she thought you needed.
"Go on," said the Canoness, warmly. With a slight smile, she inclined herself forwards attentively. Shoun felt herself drawn to her, and the words started spilling from her mouth almost involuntarily.
"Please forgive me, Mother Superior, I'm sure my question is stupid…" started Sister Shoun. She cast her eyes downward and away, before being drawn in again by her mistress' studied attention. "I'm sure I should know this by now, but I… I just…" Shoun paused, drew a breath, and started again. "Just what is the Light of Our Emperor? Exactly"
Shoun braced herself for a scolding, but to her surprise the Canoness answered without hesitation.
"Imagine a fish," she began, "who turns to her sister fish and asks, 'what is this thing called the sea?'
"Other fish scoffed, but the sister fish is wise, and knows that the things which surround us are sometimes the hardest to appreciate." The Canoness' eyes twinkled as she spoke, and Shoun felt an indescribable relief at being taken seriously.
"'The sea is all around us,' explains the sister fish, 'it nourishes us and supports us as we move through it. The whole world around us exists within it, we are born of it and from it.' As the sea is to fish, so the Light of Our Emperor is to us," she finished.
Shoun considered this.
"So this is why we abhor the traitor, who shuns the Light of Our Emperor? Because he has turned his back on our world?" she asked.
"Indeed," replied Canoness Ekaterina, and clapped her hands together. "The traitor betrayed and besmirched the Light from which he was born, like an oil slick in the pure sea. And, Sister Shoun, how do we remove this oil from our water?"
Shoun thought for a moment. "We burn it," she concluded.
"Very good, Sister Shoun" said the Canoness, smiling beatifically.
The guns behind them abruptly ceased firing. It was time. Canoness Ekaterina's commanding voice filled the sudden quiet.
"Advance to contact!"
Shoun stood, and relayed the order. Her sisters obeyed, and around her she saw the vista repeated. The Canoness roved between detachments, and as was her wont, prepared to lead from the front and centre. Shoun advanced at the head of her own section, on the right flank.
The Order advanced carefully but determinedly over the rough terrain. Though the Basilica loomed within sight, they could not yet see their enemy. Shoun peered into the gloom. She hoped desperately to see the hated traitors before they came under fire –
Shots echoed down the street, and to her left Sister Eshun dropped.
Too late.
"Contact!" cried Shoun, scanning the ruins for muzzle flashes and smoke. "Eleven o'clock!"
The sisters returned fire, holy bolt shells leaving smoking contrails as they screamed towards their targets. Near misses turned debris into bursts of splintered rockcrete. A chaotic firefight began.
Acting on instinct honed by training, Shoun signalled for three sisters to follow her, and crept rapidly along the rubble of a wall. They made their way unnoticed into an adjacent building, outside the rest of their section's field of fire. Sister Jocasta, one of the three, quickly strapped krak grenades to the internal wall. Shoun prepared her hand flamer and a frag grenade, and the sisters trained their weapons on the spot.
Three seconds later, the wall blasted chunks of plaster and brick into the nest of surprised traitors. Shoun leapt through the new hole, grenade flying and hand flamer firing, incinerating the apostates with the Emperor's Light.
Sister Jocasta had been transferred to Sister Shoun's section. Jocasta's unit had suffered heavy casualties in their last action, to the point where it was thought to be easier to reintegrate the few survivors into other sections than to build it back up to combat strength.
Jocasta brought with her the pride of her unit's achievements, but also their old habits. Sometimes, she found it hard to integrate with her new section's customs.
For example, in her old unit the ritual of devotional maintenance to the holy boltgun had been a solitary affair, a time for each sister to get closer to her weapon without distraction. In contrast, Sister Shoun's section gathered together, and performed the rituals of maintenance as a group. They felt this brought them together as a team, and also allowed each woman to be satisfied that their sisters, on whom they were ultimately relying, maintained quality in their own preparation.
As the sisters applied the holy unguents and burned the incenses of mechanical absolution together, Jocasta worried that her bolter would not receive enough incense. Though the communal area allowed the sisters to chat easily while they went about their work, it also dispersed the incense vapours more quickly. Nor did Jocasta like the idea that the incense she burned, a special Martian blend, would drift to bolters other than her own.
To make sure that her bolter received the full measure of her incense, Jocasta devised a funnel to channel the mystic vapours. Over time, this blackened the casing and devotional motifs of the bolter, making it especially ugly.
Shoun and her sisters had cleared the ambushers, but were now behind schedule. They pushed forwards, straining their senses while laboriously pulling themselves through the broken ground.
This time, Shoun saw the danger before it happened. Quickly she ordered her section down, and advanced to the limit of their cover.
The enemy had cleared a killzone between them and the outer edges of the Basilica, and installed improvised defence lines and rockcrete pillboxes. Shoun cursed their faulty intelligence; they had been equipped for clearing entrenched infantry, but not for bunker-busting.
Solid slugs whipped past her face, pock marking the bricks beside her. More buzzed overhead, a swarm of angry wasps. The traitors had seen them, and now brought their firepower to bear.
Shoun directed her section to return fire. The sisters arrayed themselves in such cover as they could, and the staccato roar of bolters in action almost drowned out the whip-crack of bullets flying past. They cut down some careless traitors who exposed themselves from their defence lines, but they were powerless to penetrate the bunkers.
The deep thud of heavy weapons joined the fray, and Shoun saw emplaced autocannons. She heard a cry, and was aghast to see Sister Ana obliterated by the autocannon shell. Worse, the shell had destroyed the muzzle of Ana's flamer.
Shoun considered their options. If they could get close enough, they could throw frag grenades or flame through the bunker vision slits and put them out of action. In theory, their powered armour was rated to protect them against small arms fire such as the enemy were employing; in practice, as the unfortunate Sister Ana had shown, the best armour was not to get hit. And they were now one flamer down.
Then Shoun saw Sister Jocasta dash across and retrieve the broken flamer. "I have an idea," she said, strapping a grenade to the ruined weapon's promethium tank. "Emperor protect!" she cried, and leapt into the clearing.
"Jocasta!" shouted Shoun in vain. She saw that holding position was no longer an option.
"Sisters! Charge!" Shoun bellowed the order and strode into the killing field.
"Mother Superior, is the faithful servant truly subject to death?" Shoun asked. "I've been wondering how she can be," she went on, feeling obliged to clarify, "when the faithful servant of Our Emperor can continue to serve Him even after death." She looked at the mechanically augmented skull that hovered near the Canoness; it had once been a sister of the Order, and now served the Emperor as a kind of automated scribe.
"And, of course, after death we are united with the Emperor in spirit," Shoun continued. "So if the faithful servant can continue to serve after death, perhaps she is not subject to death. But on the other hand, we can meet death in any number of ways with every deployment, and it is surely also true that if her heart is pierced by a bolt shell from a traitor, the faithful servant will still be… well, dead. And so subject to death after all." Shoun looked down, embarrassed by her wonderings, but glad they were no longer solely in her head.
"The faithful servant is one with death," said Canoness Ekaterina simply. Shoun looked up, then dropped her eyes again.
"Mother Superior, I… I'm not sure I understand," she said. The Canoness smiled gently, and sipped her tea before replying.
"Your question, as asked, did not allow the true answer to emerge. Think about this while you pray. You will understand when you stop thinking about it."
"Yes Mother Superior." Shoun was puzzled, but the Canoness reached over and patted her arm reassuringly.
"Don't be too hard on yourself, Sister Shoun. When you attain this realisation you will be closer to Our Emperor than ever before."
Sweat dripped from Shoun's brow. Bullets and shells were a haze of angry fireflies all around her, and she felt the punch of some hitting her armour. Luckily, the protective plates held. Without thought, she impelled herself onward.
Jocasta was ahead, drawing heavy fire as she approached the enemy pillboxes. Shoun and the other sisters of the section fired from the hip, sending traitors ducking behind their defensive lines. But their grenades and bolt shells were too far away to find the vision slits of the bunkers.
Jocasta was close enough now. She primed the grenade and threw the flamer butt-first through the fire point of the rockcrete emplacement.
The detonation echoed through the confined space, and gouts of flame poured from every opening. The traitors' screams were sharp, but short. One of the bunkers had been neutralised. But it was too late for Jocasta, who slumped into a spreading pool of blood.
Shoun looked around. Jocasta was not the only one who had fallen in the charge. She saw uncertainty written on some of her sisters' faces, and she felt it herself. Her sisters had fallen, and she ached to check on them, patch their wounds, make sure that they would survive to purge another day. She steeled herself to rely on her training.
"Fight through!" she roared. "The best first aid is to win the fight!"
The sisters crashed into the enemy lines. The fighting became close, personal, and very, very bitter.
Shoun rampaged through the traitors, spitting fire and tracing razor-edged arcs of rage. She had become Death.
The bells rang, and Sister Superior Shoun's tea was growing cold, but still she was deeply depressed. The heavy campaigning was weighing on her soul, and even the counsel of her Canoness had so far failed to shift her lethargy.
Shoun sighed, and glumly rested her head in her hands.
"I just don't know," she said. "I keep thinking of them – they died under my watch. Maybe if I'd done things differently…" her voice trailed off, as her mind again became trapped in the recent, horrid past.
The Canoness kneeled next to Shoun's chair, and laid a tender hand on her shoulder. Ekaterina's careworn face was caring once more, but Shoun realised that it was not sympathy, but rather empathy that filled her face. At some level Shoun felt silly for burdening her commander with such difficulties, difficulties that surely the Canoness herself had grappled with on many more occasions than Shoun had, but the feeling was not enough to dispel the miasma. Not yet.
Ekaterina began to whisper a story into Shoun's ear.
"There was once a Sister, who in the midst of battle, fell off a cliff. Her weapon, her precious boltgun, was lost, but somehow she caught an exposed tree branch halfway down, and arrested her fall.
"When she looked up, she saw a group of traitors on top of the cliff, readying their weapons. When she looked down, she saw a foul xenos baring its teeth.
"Then, the tree branch started to crack. But as the faithful Sister consigned her soul to Our Emperor, she glanced to the left, and saw a wild strawberry bush, with a single ripe berry.
"Before she fell, the Sister reached out for the berry and ate it. My, how sweet it tasted!"
Shoun lifted her head from her hands, and sought out the Canoness' face through red rimmed eyes.
"Every moment is a precious gift," said Canoness Ekaterina. "Every moment is an opportunity to serve Our Emperor. But when the Emperor sends you succour, take it, and remember that you will be a better servant when you are well."
Shoun nodded wordlessly. The Canoness dropped her voice again, to a conspiratorial whisper.
"I believe the Convent kitchen has a fresh delivery of strawberries," she said, and winked. "Tell them I sent you."
Smoke from the burning bunkers poured into the sky. The shattered and charred bodies of those who had forsaken the Emperor lay where they had fallen. There was a brief lull in the battle.
Shoun knew that the respite was only temporary. They had cleared the streets and approaches to the Basilica of Takeshi, but they now had to assault the edifice itself. It loomed ahead, a many legged leviathan that dwarfed the mere humans fighting in its shadow.
Shoun had logged a request for a casevac over the comm-net, but apparently there was a long wait. Her section, or what was left of it, made their fallen sisters as comfortable as they could, and resumed their advance.
As they approached within a few hundred metres, they came under fire once more. Shoun led her section into cover and established a beachhead. Soon, they began to link up with more sisters, and the first waves of reinforcements.
They began attracting more serious fire as their numbers swelled. Mortars began to range in on their position, and when they dared lift their heads near the spreading storms of shrapnel, the sisters could discern heavier weapons being wheeled into position.
Impatient, Shoun checked into the comm-net requesting permission to advance. However, she was disappointed when the Canoness' voice crackled through the comms.
"All units, hold at initial objectives, say again, hold at initial objectives. Do not advance on the Basilica."
Shoun didn't know what the hold-up was, but had to respect the order. She watched her sisters fire a few desultory shots to keep some enemy heads down, and waited.
She was on the point of asking again when she saw a twinkling from the corner of her eye. She looked up, at what seemed for a moment to be a new star, briefly visible through the clouds.
The Basilica exploded. Roiling spheres of incandescent plasma blossomed from its centre, in brilliant hues of orange and white. Again and again, seemingly without end, the molten fires utterly consumed the monstrous structure, sending smoke and flashes of flame high into the sky.
Heat from the orbital strike washed over Shoun, and the blinding light threatened to overcome her eye protection. But she couldn't look away. She stood from behind her cover, and walked into the open ground, watching the devastating power of the plasma bomb as it utterly obliterated the traitors and their stronghold.
It was beautiful.
Celestian Shoun gratefully accepted the cup of tea that Canoness Ekaterina offered her, and relaxed into her chair.
"You've come a long way from the young initiate so full of questions, Shoun," said Ekaterina, with a sly grin. "I trust your own initiates are keeping you on your toes?"
"Yes, now I'm an old Celestian full of silly questions," replied Shoun easily. "The young ones can really test my own understanding, sometimes. I have to confess I've reused some of your stories, Mother Superior," admitted Shoun.
"If you have internalised them then they are your stories now," said Ekaterina. "Emperor knows that parables like these have been around for thousands of years, I can hardly lay any claim to them."
"They – you have helped me understand so much, all these years."
"Shoun, I have given you the very flesh of Our Emperor with stories such as these, and the bones of Our Emperor I have given you in your training. But the heart of Our Emperor cannot be given. It must be found."
Ekaterina reached out her hand, and placed it on Shoun's chest.
"I am so pleased that you found Our Emperor's heart, Shoun."
The two women paused to sip their tea, and sat in companionable silence for a moment. They were interrupted by a beep from the Canoness' servo-skull.
"I do apologise, Shoun, it's terribly rude of me to check my correspondence now…" Shoun waved her apology away while the older woman leaned over to the skull.
"As I suspected… it is time to prepare for another deployment. We are wanted on Miike's World."
"Traitors?" asked Shoun. "Xenos? Some other filth?"
"Traitors," replied Ekaterina, and levered herself out of her chair. "I do hope that we can finish this talk in transit, Shoun. I haven't told anyone else yet, but I believe this deployment will be my last."
Shoun gazed up at her, shocked. Now that she looked, she saw that Canoness Ekaterina was old. Somehow, the lines and scars on her face and her body, the whitening hair, and all of the other physical evidence had been subordinate to Ekaterina's incredible vigour and awareness. Shoun realised that she had always thought of her as timeless, but in truth she must have been an old woman even when they had first met.
"You're… retiring?" Shoun asked in a hushed tone. Ekaterina paused a moment before answering.
"In a manner of speaking, yes," she replied carefully.
Shoun's heart lifted at the thought of the old Canoness staying with the Order in some capacity, and she rose to her feet with new energy.
The campaign was won, but the cost was dolorous.
Shoun stood in a ring of sisters around the mortally wounded Canoness Ekaterina. She lay on a slab of wood retrieved for a makeshift stretcher, and around her the sadness in her sisters' hearts was etched in their faces.
It seemed so unfair. The war had already been won, the pockets of resistance smashed. The improvised trap that had claimed their Canoness had no right to have survived the orbital bombardment, when barely two stones lay atop each other. A whole section of sisters had passed without triggering or noticing it, as if it had been set for Ekaterina alone.
If it hadn't just happened, Shoun would have thought it impossible. And now that it had, the sweet taste of victory was transformed into the bitterness of ashes in her mouth.
Sister Hospitaller Vivianne wept as she desperately worked at the numberless wounds in Ekaterina's side. She could see it was hopeless, but refused to believe it, and wouldn't give up. Eventually Canoness Ekaterina looked up and addressed her directly.
"Dear Vivianne… I am already lost. Please," she said, and though her breath was ragged her voice was strong. "Please. Use your talents… on other sisters who may yet live."
Vivianne looked as though she might break. The dying Canoness conjured one last warm smile.
"Go," she said. The circle parted to let Vivianne through.
"Do not mourn me long, dear sisters… we are all but a spark in the darkness," Ekaterina said as she rested her head on the hard wood. "Only Faith, Love and Devotion endure. Nothing else.
"Grant me one more boon before I go to Our Emperor…" her voice was starting to labour now, though she remained calm. "I would like to die surrounded by holy promethium. Will you do this for me?"
Nobody moved. Nobody wanted to acknowledge the end. Perhaps, everyone hoped that someone else would fulfil this last, hardest request.
Shoun swallowed, a ball of rising nerves in her throat. She felt heat in her cheeks and tears stinging her eyes, and she stepped forward.
She picked her hand flamer from the ground, where her nerveless fingers had dropped it, and took a deep breath. Then another. She felt the weight of the trigger more than ever before.
Wordlessly, she ignited the wood, walking around the stretcher until she had completed a ring of fire, careful to leave space between her Canoness and the flames.
"Thank you," whispered Ekaterina, barely audible over the crackle of the rising fire. Then she closed her eyes and moved no more.
As the wooden bier burned, and wreathed the Canoness' body in flames, Shoun raised the hand flamer to the sky and fired a long burst of flame. Her sisters followed suit, firing bolters, pistols and hand flamers into the sky.
Though black smoke spiralled into the air, their final salute lit the world in shades of orange and yellow. The Light of the Emperor would endure.