The following is a prequel to my longer story, Chimera. It is set around two years earlier, and deals with the backstory of how the Chimera transport called Salvation came to bear that name. Both stories can stand alone: you can read one without the other.
This story prominently features the Sisters of Battle, the Imperial Guard and the forces of Slaanesh.
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A stray rocket shattered an exquisite stained glass window, showering the squad of Sisters of Battle with dozens of multicolored shards. Sister Raquel winced visibly and muttered a stream of impious curses against the cultists.
“You injured?” asked Sister Superior Elena, her manner gruff and perfunctory.
Raquel shook her head, shards of glass tumbling out of her bleached hair. “That was our most beautiful window. The Emperor must be disappointed in us.”
Elena barked out a short laugh. “Look around you, Sister Raquel.”
The walls and pillars of the Cathedral of His Merciless Judgment were riddled with bullet holes and splashed with blood. Starlight shone through collapsed sections of roof. Hours of shelling had annihilated the beautiful mosaics of the floor, which had once drawn pilgrims from all over the Imperium. On the altar of Saint Macharius lay the intertwined corpses of a Chaos sorcerer and a daemonette of Slaanesh, slain in mid-coitus by the Emperor’s daughters for their act of defilement.
“Look around you,” Elena repeated. “Not much left to save, is there? Do you really believe over fifty of our sisters have died tonight for the sake of pretty windows and fancy architecture?”
Raquel seemed taken aback. “They died to save the Emperor’s own house on Daedalus.”
“Wrong. They died for the Emperor. Period. This building? Nothing but an idol. We are not idolaters. When the Emperor judges us, He will not count the windows we’ve saved, but the heretics we’ve slain. And the longer we hold this place—”
The theological lecture was cut short by Sister Livia, the comm officer. “Sister Superior. General Birsk is saying he doesn’t have the manpower to take back the cathedral. He’s about to level the whole island with artillery.”
Poor young Sister Raquel looked sick in her stomach. Like most of her sisters, she had been raised and trained here and knew no other home. Elena herself felt a pang of regret, but if the cathedral had to be destroyed to kill the hundreds of cultists and daemons inside, so be it. It could be rebuilt. She borrowed the vox caster from Livia.
“Sister Superior Elena speaking,” she said. “Any chance you can give us time to evac?”
There was a pause at the other end of the line. “Affirmative,” said the general. “Be quick about it. They’re summoning daemons all over the place.”
“Don’t I know,” said Elena irritably. She had killed many of them with her own gun.
She ended the communication, rose to her full height, and addressed the dozen remaining Sisters huddled in the reliquary chamber.
“To the bridge… no matter what stands before us,” she said, affixing a one-shot flamethrower attachment under the barrel of her boltgun. “Sister Raquel, you wanted to save an idol? Carry the reliquary. Sisters Sarabeth and Ruxana, you’re on point.”
Raquel took the gold-plated box that contained the mummified hand of Lord Solar Macharius with as much care as if it were her own newborn baby. Sarabeth and Ruxana hefted their heavy bolters and took the lead. Outside the reliquary room, the half-collapsed nave had become a maze of fallen masonry and burning vehicles. A large volume of inaccurate, undisciplined gunfire greeted the Sisters of Battle as soon as they passed the doorstep. They answered in kind, their own bolter fire much deadlier. Bare-chested cultists fell before them like wheat under the scythe, and though they made poor foes, there seemed to be no end to them.
Sisters Sarabeth and Ruxana carved a path through the enemy with ruthless efficiency, pausing only to reload their heavy bolters with new ammunition belts. The former was grim-faced and silent, her jaw clenched so hard that it was a wonder her teeth did not shatter. The latter grinned like a bloody maniac and yelled in the kind of language that would earn her a week of floor-scrubbing duty on any other day. The Sister Superior heaved a long-suffering sigh. While she could commend Ruxana’s courage and ability, she wished the girl could treat the sacred art of battle with the decorum it deserved.
Sarabeth was the first to fall, from a bullet in the throat. Three cultists lying in ambush behind twin pillars waited until she was close before opening fire. Most of the Sisters took cover. Ruxana did not. She weathered the first salvo unflinchingly, trusting her power armor to protect her, and fired back without halting her advance. Within seconds, Sarabeth was avenged.
In her battle-lust, Ruxana failed to notice the unpinned grenade that rolled out of a dead cultist’s hand. Sister Superior Elena saw it, but her warning cry came too late. She could only watch helplessly as the explosion bowled Ruxana to the floor. Instructing her squad mates to cover her, she advanced to check on her fallen warrior’s status. Ruxana was conscious and looked like she was still trying to process what had just happened. Blood pooled under her left leg, where several grenade fragments had punched right through the armor plates.
“I’ll stabilize her,” said Elena. “Bring me a pew, we’ll use it to carry her.”
Ruxana’s gaze focussed. “No! You don’t have time. They’re about to—”
“I leave no one behind,” Elena cut her off.
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Standing on the beach on the mainland, General Olever Birsk looked grimmer and grimmer every minute as he surveyed the burning cathedral with his binoculars. For almost an hour now, cultists had been channelling the Warp energy of this sacred place to summon daemonettes. Hundreds of the female-shaped, creamy-skinned creatures were now gathered on the island where the cathedral stood. At first they just milled around aimlessly, but now they were singing in entrancing voices and forming groups. Soon they would march. Birsk had men guarding the bridge, but they were not enough to contain the tide.
“We have to call the strike,” insisted Commissar Ricimer. “You gave the Sisters enough time.”
General Birsk pursed his lips. “The enemy’s not on the move yet.”
“You know it’s only a matter of minutes.”
Birsk was silent for a moment, pondering his options. “Avram,” he said at last, without turning.
Behind him, the driver of his Chimera transport straightened. He was a grey-haired, balding man in his late middle years, with callused hands and a bit of a paunch.
“I believe Chimeras are amphibious?” asked the general.
“Yes, sir,” said Avram.
“I’m going to blow up this bridge to trap the enemy on the island.” He turned to face his driver. “You’ll drive across the channel and evac the Sisters. Be quick. In fifteen minutes, starting now, I’ll pound the cathedral to dust. You don’t want to be there when that happens.”
Most men would balk at such a dangerous mission, even in the presence of a commissar. Avram was not most men. “I’ll do my best, sir,” he said, sounding as calm as always.
“There’ll likely be a medal in it,” Birsk saw fit to add.
A hint of a smile appeared on Avram’s lips. “There damn well better be. Sir.”
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Avram’s gunner, Milo, was less than enthusiastic. “We’ve been fighting all day and half the night!” he fumed, loading an ammunition belt into the turret’s heavy bolter. “Always in the middle of it all! Haven’t we done enough? We’ve got men who didn’t even join the battle. They’re well rested. Why not give them the job?”
“Because they’ll fail.” Avram’s thick fingers flew over the dashboard, flicking switches and pushing buttons with the dexterity of a pianist. “They picked us because we’re the best.”
“No. They picked us because we were closest.”
“Perhaps,” Avram allowed. “But we’ll
succeed because we’re the best.”
He was not altogether sincere. While
he was without a doubt the best Chimera driver in the Cadian 18th Division, Milo was only a middling gunner, at best. The young lad’s aim was good, but he had trouble keeping a cool head under fire. It took several years to truly master the turret of a Chimera, and gunners who served under Avram never seemed to live long enough. Milo was not fooled by the old man’s forced attempt at encouragement, and kept complaining until firmly ordered to cut it out.
“How long do we have?” asked Milo.
Avram looked down at the dashboard clock. Eleven minutes left. “That’s my concern, not yours. Focus on shooting.”
He slammed on the gas and the Chimera surged forward into the channel. It was not long before water rose above the turret, plunging the driver and his gunner in darkness. Avram chose not to turn on his spotlight. He knew where he was going, and he wanted the element of surprise on his side.
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Sister Superior Elena and her dwindling squad butchered their way out through the great bronze gates, just in time to see the bridge blown to smithereens by General Birsk’s artillery. It mattered little; from the look of things, they never had a chance to reach the bridgehead in the first place. The plaza of the cathedral was awash with daemonettes and the cultists who had summoned them. Far more than one squad could fight through.
“Back inside,” she barked, emptying a clip into the nearest pack of daemonettes before slamming the gates shut and barring them. “Get in cover. We make our stand here.”
Abandoning all hope for survival felt oddly comforting. No more life-or-death decisions. No more wondering if she could have done things differently. The only uncertainty that remained was how many foes they would bring down before they fell.
It makes little difference, she realized, using a pew to brace the heavy bolter taken from the late Sarabeth.
Anything we don’t kill, our artillery will. But at least we go down fighting.
Her eight surviving sisters spread out in a ragged half circle around the twin gates. Theresa stood closest, flamethrower at the ready. The wounded Ruxana managed to find a comfortable position behind the altar of Saint Ollanius, having reluctantly switched to a bolt pistol now that she could no longer withstand the kick of her heavy bolter. Said heavy bolter was now in the hands of Sister Samira, who guarded the left flank with Livia and Guinevere. Raquel, Zoah and Clarize took position on the right flank.
The enemy outside did not bother trying to ram the gates. They blew them off their hinges with missile launchers. Daemonettes poured in with superhuman swiftness and grace, supported by cultists’ gunfire. Theresa stepped forward bravely and doused the front ranks with burning promethium. Even as their soft white flesh sizzled and burned to a crisp, the daemonettes pressed on, crying out in what sounded more like orgasmic pleasure than pain. Theresa was soon reduced to using her flamethrower as a club. She disappeared under a mass of chittering, lobster-like claws, her blood spurting out in great arcs above the melee. Wasting no time or energy trying to rescue her, her sisters fired at will into the densely packed enemy.
There was little skill or technique involved in the massacre that ensued. It was all about pulling the trigger and reloading quickly. The bodies of both cultists and daemonettes piled up across the doorstep of the cathedral, their foul blood mingling and seeping between the tiles. So focused were the Sisters of Battle on the gates that it took them a moment to notice that Guinevere and Zoah had gone silent. Each lay dead with a large hole in the back of the head.
“Snipers behind!” yelled Elena, flattening herself to the ground just in time to duck a bullet. It came from a balcony. They had been foolish not to watch their backs; they knew the building was still full of cultists. “Samira! Five o’clock! Keep them pinned!” she ordered, trying to buy herself time to think.
Keeping her head low, she made a mental inventory of the features of the nave.
The incense burners, she remembered, looking up at the large silver pots that hung low from the ceiling. She raised her boltgun and methodically put explosive rounds through five of them. Aromatic smoke wafted out of the bullet holes, plunging the room in fog in less than a minute. When Samira had to stop firing to reload, the hidden gunmen opened fire again, but their shots were more haphazard; they were now aiming by sound only.
That’ll do for now, thought Elena. They had to move fast. With most windows broken and whole sections of ceiling missing, the fog would clear soon. “Raquel,” she said, choosing the youngest, most quick-footed sister. “Go deal with them.”
Raquel carefully set down the reliquary she had been carrying, left behind her cumbersome boltgun in favor of a large knife, and scurried up a staircase leading to the balcony. In the meantime, the assault against the front gates had come to a lull, as if the enemy were rethinking their options. All Elena and the rest of her squad could do was wait for Raquel to finish her mission while bullets rained down around them from the balconies. After an agonizingly long time, the rifles went silent.
“All clear,” yelled Raquel from the fog-enshrouded heights of the nave. “On my way back.”
Elena exhaled in relief and squinted at the gates through the rapidly thinning fog, wondering how long things would stay quiet. Right on cue, the distinctive roars of bolter fire and a promethium engine rang out in the plaza.
“Sounds like a Chimera,” said Sister Livia.
The Sister Superior grinned fiercely. “Sounds like salvation.”
In instant later, the lone vehicle backed inside the cathedral at breakneck speed, fitting narrowly through the doorway like a thread through a needle’s eye. Her battle-scarred, dark green surface glistened wetly from her underwater drive. Her turret was still pouring explosive rounds into the unseen foe outside the building. The transport came to a grinding halt in the middle of the squad’s half circle and popped open her back door to let the survivors in. Samira and Clarize helped carry Ruxana inside, soon followed by Livia and Elena. The interior of the vehicle was rather cramped for five Sisters of Battle in their bulky power armor, and Elena had to do some shoving to get to the driver.
“Don’t leave yet,” she said. “There’s one more. She’s on her way.”
“What?” shrieked the Chimera’s young gunner. “No! We got no time!”
The driver, whose name tag read
Avram Loske, seemed a calmer sort. He simply turned a long, weary look to Elena. “If we wait too long, they’ll close the gap we just opened,” he said.
“We can reopen it.”
Avram Loske shrugged a shoulder and rapped on the dashboard clock with one stubby finger. “Five minutes and a half before the strike. I need three to get us to safety. You do the math.”
Elena let out a grunt of acknowledgement.
“The rest of you will man the lasguns,” said the driver, jerking his thumb at the vehicle’s twin rows of lasguns poking out of each lateral bulkhead. “This isn’t a hovercab service. You’re inside, you’re part of the crew.”
“Oh, we’ll pull our weight,” Elena assured him, a tad insulted that he would assume otherwise. “She’s got a name?”
“Who?”
“Your Chimera.”
“Nope.”
“She should. Mine’s Elena. Sister Superior Elena.”
The old driver just shrugged again, and lit himself a lho-stick. “Is it me,” he said, frowning, “or is it smelling like incense in here?”
Sister Raquel kept them waiting until the very last moment, but at last she scrambled down the stairs and sprinted to the Chimera, almost slipping twice on fallen bits of masonry. There was blood all over her face and chest from her knife work on the balcony. When the door of the Chimera slammed shut behind her, an expression of near horror dawned on her face.
“I forgot the relic on the floor,” she breathed.
“The relic doesn’t matter,” snapped Elena. “We’re getting out.”
The vehicle thundered out of the cathedral, straight into the teeth of the awaiting Chaos army.
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“Those heretics are just full of resources, aren’t they?” grumbled General Birsk, lowering his binoculars.
“They are.” Commissar Ricimer’s dry tone carried a heavy
I told you so implication.
In the absence of a bridge, the cultists on the island had stopped summoning daemonettes. Now they were summoning furies. The winged beasts’ numbers grew every minute.
“That’s it,” said Ricimer. “Call the strike. Or I’ll do it myself.”
Birsk sighed and brought the mic of his vox-caster to his lips. “All Basilisk units. Open fire.”
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Opening a path to the cathedral had been easy. The cultists, busy with their depraved rituals of summoning, were not prepared to deal with an armored transport emerging from the channel with guns blazing. On the way out, however, surprise was no longer on Avram’s side. Autocannons were now trained on the Chimera from various dugouts on the plaza and the beach beyond it. Avram knew that the high-powered guns could pierce the armor of his vehicle without much trouble. The cultists’ ragged ranks were reinforced not only with daemonettes of Slaanesh, which Avram had been expecting, but also leathery-winged humanoids with doglike faces and red-brown skin. From the turret, Milo sprayed bolt rounds at the nearest winged daemons, his panic fouling both his aim and his judgment.
“Throne damn it, Milo!” yelled Avram. “Ignore the winged things! Kill the autocannons! Kill—”
Armor-piercing gunfire hit the Chimera from several angles, putting many holes through her armor and one through Milo’s chest. The gunner slumped in his seat without a sound, his dead eyes wide in confusion. The Sisters of Battle returned fire with the Chimera’s lasguns.
Avram did not waste a second mourning his gunner. There would be a time for it, and now was not it. “Any of you is trained in the use of turrets?” he asked, driving in zigzags towards the beach to throw off the enemy’s aim.
Sister Superior Elena paused briefly from firing her lasgun. “Ruxana,” she said, addressing the one with a wounded leg, who perked up in obvious excitement. “Get in there.”
Avram gave Elena, then Ruxana, a skeptical look over his shoulder.
“She’s our best with heavy bolters,” said Elena. “Wounded or not.”
Avram shrugged. “If you say so.”
Two sisters unceremoniously dragged the late Milo out of his seat and helped Ruxana into it. “Kill the autocannons, you said? I’m on it.”
Indeed, she seemed to know her way around a heavy bolter. How high to aim to account for gravity. How to lead a moving target. How to reload in mere seconds. Her accuracy was mediocre; clearly she was not used to firing from a speeding vehicle. She made up for it in sheer volume of fire… and a level of enthusiasm that Avram found unsettling. That lunatic was having
fun. After dealing with the big guns, she turned her bolter upwards to bring down the winged beasts fluttering around the Chimera.
The bombardment began just as the transport reached the beach. In a dramatic twist of fate, or perhaps by the whim of the Emperor, the first shell struck the steeple of the cathedral full-on, ringing the bell one final time; the death knell of all heretics trapped on the island. The shells that followed crashed into the roof, into the walls, on the plaza, on the beach. Cultists made a futile scramble for cover and died by dozens. A few blasts came perilously close to the Chimera, kicking up fountains of sand and forcing Avram to make hairpin turns to avoid the wall of flames.
“Huh. They’re early,” said the driver in an almost matter-of-fact tone, looking down at his clock. “Might have to talk to the general about that.” He glanced over his shoulder at his passengers. “We’ll get a bit wet. Bullet holes in our armor and all that.”
As the cathedral collapsed behind him, he floored the pedal and drove under the water.
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Thirty days after the bombing of the Cathedral of His Merciless Judgment, the world of Daedalus was all but rid of the pleasure cults of Slaanesh. What few survivors remained had scurried back into the shadows like cockroaches. Hunting them down would fall to the new, more competent governor and his forces. The planetary capital was alive with song and laughter as the men of the Imperial Guard enjoyed their last night before embarking on their next campaign.
Avram partied on his own, as usual. Just him and half a bottle of the cheapest amasec on the market. He poured some down a storm drain for the late Milo, the eleventh gunner to lose his life under his command. Near midnight, pleasantly tipsy, he returned to his battered old Chimera to witness the ceremony. Sister Superior Elena and her surviving squad mates were already waiting for him in the garage. For the better part of an hour, they dabbed the vehicle with holy water and fragrant oils and sang hymns to the Emperor. According to Elena, the Chimera would henceforth be shielded from the foul witchcraft of Chaos, so long as her driver remained a worthy servant of the Emperor. She now had a name;
Salvation.
Avram was not particularly impressed or moved by the ritual. A down-to-earth man, he was skeptical of anything arcane or spiritual. Nevertheless, he could appreciate the intent behind the gesture. The High Command may have denied him the promised medal, but it was good to know that
some people were grateful.
Throughout the ceremony, Ruxana sat on a pile of spare tires, her badly mangled leg stretched out in front of her. She wore civilian attire and her bleached hair was reverting to its natural dark color at the roots. When her sisters filed out at the end of the religious service, she limped over to Avram, leaning on her crutch and carrying a rumpled document bearing the seals of both the Cadian 18th and the Order of Our Martyred Lady.
“Hey, old man,” she said, handing him the document. “I’m to be your new gunner.”
Avram’s eyebrows went up, both at the news and at Ruxana’s manners. “They kicked you out of your order, I take it?” he asked, skimming the document.
“They didn’t
kick me out,” said Ruxana, slightly miffed at the suggestion. “I just can’t serve in a militant order anymore. Not with my bad leg. So they let me choose. A quiet position in a convent, or a combat role in the Imperial Guard. And can you picture me writing theological essays by candlelight until I’m old and grey? Me neither.”
Avram chuckled mirthlessly. It was typical of elite armies like the Adepta Sororitas and the Militarum Tempestus to foist their crippled or mentally unstable warriors on the Imperial Guard. He suspected that Ruxana’s bad leg was only half the reason why her order wanted her out. “So it’s just Ruxana now? No more Sister Ruxana?”
“My squad mates shorten it to Rook.”
“Rook it is, then. Welcome aboard. You’ll have to work on your accuracy from a moving vehicle.”
“I will.” She paused. “Is that amasec you’re carrying? I’ve never had it. In my order, all you get is bad church wine that tastes like vinegar.”
Avram handed her the near-empty bottle. Rook took a tentative sip and grimaced. “Not much better than church wine, is it?” smirked the driver.
“It’s even worse,” said Rook. She downed the rest of the bottle. “Let’s go get some more.”
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And same, my languange is not English either. So no worries