The R9-47 extended rail rifle fired a half-kilo tungsten slug at nine times the speed of sound. It was capable of breaching the armoured hull of a heavy tank, or crashing an air to space APC with a well-enough-placed shot to the engine intakes. It was meant for neither.
Its purpose was to kill a Saint.
The operative inspected his weapon for the last time, hands steady despite the heavy turbulence trying to toss the drop pod into a tumble. Of course, the long firearm was merely a tool. In order to achieve that purpose, it needed the right workman. He smiled to himself, and watched the flight computer. The four stabiliser fins extended by themselves, and the meteorite-like chaotic fall steadied into the laser-guided descent of a bomb.
The pod’s drop thrusters only roared when the little craft was a hundred metres from impact with the planet’s surface. The speed went from nearly two hundred and fifty kilometres an hour to twenty five in a sharp curve. The inertial dampeners within the tiny compartment insulated the forces ripping into the craft and reduced them to a lurch, albeit a sickening one.
The bump of landing was a heavy one, and immediately the escape hatch blew outwards. The operative ducked through, dropped onto the balls of his feet, and activated his transmitter. The outgoing signal was heavily scrambled, and as simple as it could be.
“Anubis to Nest: drop complete.”
Williamson Colony was a shadow of its former self, but he had no sadness or remorse for the ruin and the bones around him. Bitter practicality drew his eye to every potential hiding place from above and around. The wrecked public transport shuttle, complete with the charred skeletons of the passengers. Good cover in all directions, should he go inside it. The crumbling buildings. Excellent method of traversal, should they be uninhabited by soldiers or civilians. Also, helpful to orient himself.
He jogged towards what remained of an enormous skyscraper, once a centre of galactic commerce, now a skeleton of strong alloy frames, with concrete flesh hanging on a scattering of levels. The heads-up-display in his helmet spotted no sensor drones above or around him. He switched to scan for movement, any twitch that could be registered on his finely tuned instruments. A tattered rag draped over a desiccated skeleton fluttered in the breeze. A passing fighter dislodged a few rivulets of aged dust in its wake, that tumbled in streams from the jagged edges of ripped up roadway. The HUD painted all of it like a digital artist, drawing his eye to each scrap of disturbance.
A quiet voice whispered from the internal speakers in his helmet. “Horus to Anubis. Drop complete.
Proceeding to rendezvous.”
Anubis said nothing, but sent a quick signal pulse as confirmation. His spotter would reach their perch first, as planned, then they would commence the mission.
He cleared the block and began jogging around the lip of a nuclear impact crater. What the bomb hadn’t vaporised stuck out of the dusty, glassed ground in melted, misshaped twists. The radiation sensors in his armours CPU showed twelve hundred RADs, fairly steady while he kept his distance.
As he ran, and his sensors monitored the irradiated surroundings, he called up the dossier on Saint Fatum. A holographic image of the armoured figure appeared on his HUD.
The cloak it wore hid the majority of its bulk, with a collar that raised around the sides of the helmet. The faceplate wore an expression of emotionless, serene neutrality. Anubis was always bothered by the carved faces. Saints looked like giant, cherubic, metal dolls that one might give to a child, and having seen what the warriors were capable of in ruthless tactica and personal combat, the likeness was nauseating.
Fatum used a pair of large swords, as well as a gigantic, high powered gatling gun that would normally be seen mounted on a dropship or tank. Only the servos in the armour made it wieldable.
How many had the Saint killed? If it were like any of the other Saints, tens of thousands. Fatum was particularly noted for its exploits on the battlefields of Williamson, Nuevo Madrid and Aldebaran, not to mention whatever it had done in command of a battle fleet.
Anubis pulled away from the crater and sprinted down a covered alleyway. The ground cracked and gave way before him, the next step on his route towards the perch. He sent a scanner pulse ahead before he leapt, spotting no traps or sensors, then dropped into the city’s bowels.
He crouched and rolled as his feet hit the mag rail line below, and came up into a sprint. Nine miles began to tick away to his target.
He skirted around around one derailed train after passing the second mile, and had to pick his way through a second after the third. Upended seats and shrivelled bodies scattered around the broken and breached metal walls. Anubis dived past pieces of the driver and out of the shattered window before sprinting onwards again.
His body was being flooded with stimulants in order to keep him going but he knew he would have to slow his pace eventually. He checked the mission timer. Two hours remained before Saint Fatum was expected to land.
The miles turned to metres, and the digits quickly went from four to three. He slowed to a jog as they went down to two, and walked the rest of the way. He activated the transmitter in his helmet and encrypted it, cloaking it as a spike in the ambient, planet-wide radiation.
“Anubis to Horus. On approach.”
The mag rail passed directly beneath the skyscraper shell that they had chosen, one that had half-collapsed under the assault of nuclear shockwaves. Daylight poked through rubble ahead of him.
With the assistance of his armour’s servos, lifting enough away to climb up took very little time. He sent a sensor pulse up through the gap. Nothing was up there to greet him except for the dead.
Once Anubis reached the surface, even craning his neck upwards didn’t reveal the top of the tower they had chosen for their vantage point. The whole structure was leaning like a drunk against a bar, windows shattered and walls crumbling. The street was empty, as it should be.
Anubis sprinted through the nearest breached wall and into the skyscraper. Whatever the building had been when the colony was at its peak, it was now an indecipherable mess. What remained of the dead gave nothing away, their uniforms long since reduced to little more than draped rags. Everything else was dust or burned meat, the civilisation here little more than an echo in a mausoleum.
He crossed the various offices and storerooms until he found the lobby. The bank of elevators were still there, though obviously no longer functional. He scanned each of he nine tubes. The ruined cabins were blocking five of them. All of them were bent and buckled by the semi-collapse of the skyscraper, but two were still intact all the way up to the roof, even with a bend in the middle where the building had begun to fall.
Anubis chose the one with the least amount of damage. Once he pried the doors open, he spotted the tether that Horus had left for him. He attached it to his armour’s belt, and activated the winch at the top. There was no point in alerting his spotter, the winch was doing that for him.
At the break in the shaft, he re-oriented himself, and the angle practically let him run up the wall. After twenty minutes, he reached the top.
Gripping spikes extended from his boots, and he stepped out onto the sickeningly slanted roof. The view of the ruins was breathtaking in its macabre nature. The old church to the Whole was the only building still standing, in the midst of yet another rebuild, sitting under a radiation shield. The beginnings of a new colony that was doomed to be bombed into dust again within the year.
There it was, covered in scaffolding, buzzing with aircraft and construction drones, along with a crew wearing radiation suits. Exactly where Saint Fatum was due to arrive, to inspect the construction, in less than thirty minutes. The landing pad, which would be the Saint’s deathbed, was easily visible.
As Anubis patrolled the roof, looking for Horus, he took weather condition readings. The wind was high, but he could compensate for that. The decline from the roof to the landing pad was an angle of one hundred and forty degrees. Not bad. He could adjust for that too.
Where had his spotter set up?
He looked around the roof with a frown. He considered breaking protocol for a second and sending a transmission, but no. Not while they were in hostile territory.
Anubis unslung the R9-47 from his back and disengaged the safety. Aside from that, he only had a pair of pistols that could fire in a three round burst of small arms fire. With a few eye commands on his HUD, he turned up the sensitivity of his audio sensors. The wind howled louder, and he dampened it.
Footsteps. The whirr of mechanised joints. Steady, calm, breaths, distorted through a helmet speaker. The growing whine of something spinning, spinning, spinning, faster and faster...
Anubis bolted for the edge of the roof as Saint Fatum stepped out from behind the bank of elevators. The churning fire of the gatling gun was deafening to his enhanced audio. He dived off the roof and onto the slanted wall of the skyscraper, as a bullet punched into his shoulder.
He slid and tumbled down the slope, trying to reorient himself, before it disappeared from under him entirely. His hip struck the ledge of an empty window frame, but before he could tumble into oblivion, he fired a grappling hook blindly. He heard the impact as it latched onto something, and jerked him to a halt.
Anubis activated the internal winch as his body was flooded with painkillers. As he rolled over the ledge, another burst of gunfire chattered from the roof above.
A stimulant swam through his bloodstream, clearing his vision. His heart had no idea what to do under the influence of the medications, and seemed to be agonising over the decision, translating to literal agony. How had Fatum known where they would be? Where was Horus? Someone must have sold them out.
As drugs dulled his pain, Anubis took in the wreck of a room he had landed in. A suite of some kind, with shattered plant pots, rotten furniture that had once been plush, a huge refrigerator whose chrome had turned muddy. He jogged through the ruin, past peeling walls and stained paintings, and ducked into a filthy, plush bathroom. A skeleton rested in the bathtub, leaning against the side with a relaxed grin.
Anubis activated his transmitter. “Anubis to Nest, mission failed, extraction request urgent!”
Static hissed through the receiver. Either he was being jammed, or his ship in orbit had been intercepted.
He was cornered in this bathroom. Saint Fatum would be on its way down.
Anubis jogged back to the window, and enhanced his audio sensors again. He couldn’t hear anything on the roof now. However, on the horizon, a row of four black shapes were approaching the skyscraper. Dropships. Probably on all sides.
He began running a scan for Horus, and slid back down the wall towards the ground far below. It would be a miles long sprint back to the drop pod, a sprint that would inevitably be a running firefight. The pod wouldn’t last long, more than likely, if it hadn’t already been destroyed. He could still detect the weak signature from its beacon.
His readout pinged. Horus’s armour had receivers in every plate. The pings were coming from five different directions, meaning he was almost certainly dead. Ripped apart by Fatum. Cast from his armour, in which case the radiation would have killed him in minutes.
Anubis was truly alone, but he had no time to process that fact before he was proven wrong. An arm shot out of a broken window, mechanical and covered in armour. The long fingers tightened around his upper arm and dragged him back into the building.
Another arm snatched his leg. The remains of a bull-pen full of offices was upside down and starting to spin. Alarms blared in his helmet. The integrity of his armour was failing. The schematic flashed up. The seam seals were struggling to stay intact. He was being pulled apart.
Anubis yanked the pin from one of the stun grenades on his belt. The alarm grew louder and changed pitch as the three seconds to detonation seemed to stretch.
He snapped the audiovisual sensors in his helmet off just before the grenade went off. The bang was dulled, but still loud enough to make his ears ring. Fatum dropped him immediately, and Anubis rolled away. When he opened his eyes, the Saint had drawn its swords.
Anubis brought the R9-47 to bear as quickly as he could, but had no time to be accurate. When he squeezed the trigger, it seemed as if the slug hit before the weapon bucked with the recoil. The smashing of Fatum’s armour overrode the crack of the projectile entirely ignoring the irrelevancy of the sound barrier.
Saint Fatum staggered backwards towards the window. Its armour was breached at the stomach, the plates around the impact cracked and bent inwards. The smoking hole was leaking blood down to the groin, before the breach was sealed shut with foam.
Anubis hauled himself up and bolted for Fatum. He knew what would be happening within its frame. The wound: maybe fatal, maybe not, was being sealed. Painkillers and stims were flooding through the Saint’s modified body. The CPU in the armour had already calculated the next five moves of the fight. As soon as Fatum came to its senses, Anubis would be dead. And all of that was happening faster than a blink.
Anubis lowered himself and bent his knees as he crashed into the Saint, driving it back towards the empty window.
Right at the threshold, as Fatum began to tip backwards, one of its four mechanical arms struck Anubis in the ribs. His armour bent inwards and broke bones. Another hand went for his neck, and tried to pull him out into the radiation stained air.
He drew both of the pistols at his hips and pressed one barrel to the armour at the Saint’s throat. The other he pointed at the foam filled wound.
He pumped both triggers. The shock of the three-round burst tearing into flesh made the mechanical fingers instinctively release. Momentum took Fatum backwards. The fingers snatched at Anubis again, but the Saint was too far away now.
Then it was gone, tumbling towards the ground.
An alarm sounded in Anubis ‘s helmet before he could watch the shrinking figure strike the cracked road below. Incoming weapons fire.
He dived backwards. One of the dropships had pulled ahead of the rest and opened fire. He threw himself back into the bathroom again, snatching up his rifle again. He only had a dozen rail slugs on his belt, not enough to fight them all off.
He loaded one into the R9-47’s breech and charged the rails. He could remove this immediate problem at least. He scoped in on the dropship drifting towards him. He projected its course and aimed for one of the engines.
The rifle thrummed as he sent the shot, and the internal components of the engine burst into flame. A moment later, the aircraft spun out. The building shuddered as it struck the side of the building and exploded.
Then the entire skyscraper groaned. It began to lurch and lean even further. Then the lurch became a tilt. Then a slow fall, like a falling tree.
Anubis bolted for the window, up a steepening incline. At the end, he had to leap and grab onto the ledge with his fingertips.
He hauled himself up, and the hill had flipped upside down. He slid and ran down the wall of the skyscraper, leaping or weaving around the broken windows. When he reached almost seven floors down, the skyscraper hit the ground and kicked his legs out from under him.
Gunfire began again, ripping through the concrete to his right. Anubis rolled away and jumped down into the building.
When he hit the twisted metal and broken concrete, he felt the connection to the drop pod cut. That was it. His last method of escape was gone.
He was going to need the rest of his ammo over the next... who knew how long. Perhaps the rest of his life, which wouldn’t be long, given where he was.
Anubis picked his way through the ruins, sending the occasional sensor pulse out through the gaps in the wall. The dropships were still hanging around the fallen building, hovering above with weapons ready. It wouldn’t be long before they dropped their troops.
Hide or fight?
He kept an eye out for any grates or cracks in the ground that led to the sewer or another mag-train rail. Derelict offices and conference rooms, as well as rooms that had no identifiable use at all anymore, passed him by as he clambered over rubble or ducked through the doorways that now lay on their side.
The wall to his right exploded inwards without any warning. Anubis didn’t feel what struck him in the side, only knowing that he was flying into an office ceiling with enough force to send him straight through. At first he thought it had been a rocket fired from above, but rockets didn’t walk on steel-booted feet.
Saint Fatum limped through the hole it had made, single minded in its purpose. It prowled towards Anubis, who was still struggling to his feet.
He backed off as quickly as he could, bringing the R9-47 to bear. The Saint had no space to dodge, nor any speed. Anubis squeezed the trigger, and the receiver clicked empty.
The dropship impact... the fall of the building... he hadn’t...
His mind spun, and then Fatum struck him, and sent it spinning the opposite way. The armoured fist was like getting hit by a torpedo.
Anubis impacted the wall with enough force to blast straight through it. Alarms in his helmet shrilly screeched in his ear. The diagnostic of his armour showed dents and buckling all up his left side. He scrambled up and bolted down the sideways corridor into the darkness, engaging his night vision as he did so.
Saint Fatum’s armour was dented and torn, blood leaked from the bullet wound in its stomach. One of the four arms had been ripped away, another was broken, though he couldn’t tell whether they were mechanical or they had once been organic. It was dragging its left leg. Half of the Saint’s cherubic faceplate was dented and distorted, almost skeletal in appearance.
Anubis yanked another rail slug from his belt and opened the breech of his rifle. As soon as it was locked in and ready, he brought it to bear, but one of those giant arms snatched the barrel and turned it aside as he pulled the trigger.
The rail slug blasted through a sideways ceiling and caved in the wall above them. As rubble fell and started striking both Saint and sniper, Fatum snatched at Anubis’s armour and drove a fist towards his faceplate. Anubis managed to turn his head, and the armoured clubs of knuckles slammed against his helmet. His HUD flickered, and he felt the dents they had made brushing against his head.
The grapple was broken when a chunk of concrete hit Anubis in the shoulder, and Fatum in the forearm. Anubis spun the R9-47 around and drove the stock into the Saint’s head, inverting the cherub’s nose. All he got in response was a sharp kick that threw him ten feet and onto his back. He lost his grip on the rifle, blearily hearing it clatter away into the dark.
As soon as he landed, he drew both pistols and levelled one of them at Fatum. He had no idea how many rounds he had left in each mag, but if they bought him a second or two, he could live with it.
He squeezed the trigger as he clambered to his feet. He got four bursts off before it clicked empty, and switched to the other. The rounds bounced off the Saint’s armour mostly, but one round stuck in a plate, and another breached with a loud clang.
Anubis holstered the empty pistol and steadied the other with both hands. This time, only three bursts spat forth, but five of the nine bullets slammed into the breach, sending blood gushing onto the dented plates and onto the irradiated dust.
A distorted groan of agony and fury ripped forth from the Saint’s helmet, but it stayed on its feet still. Before Anubis could reload, Fatum lunged.
Anubis knew too well what those mechanically enhanced arms were capable of. He dodged backwards, but the monster’s charge did not falter, fuelled by every lie of its unholy doctrine.
As soon as Anubis’s back hit the wall behind him, he jumped to his right and scrambled away. Fatum crashed into the wall behind him and pursued relentlessly, tearing through horizontal doorways and ruined furniture.
It was a short pursuit. Anubis turned left down a corridor, then right down one of the elevator shafts, only to be confronted by twisted metal beams and concrete rubble.
He had no opportunity to double back. When he turned, Fatum was staggering into the shaft, between him and escape.
“I’d guess the medical systems in your armour have been destroyed,” Anubis growled into his helmet mic. Fatum took one plodding step towards him after another undeterred. “Fully functional, you’d best me in single combat. Not any more. You might have gotten the jump on my spotter and killed him. You won’t be able to do that with me. I’ve seen you bleed.”
Fatum never wavered in its approach. “You are in no better condition than I... heretic Anubis. Yes, I know who you are, and who your heretic spotter Horus was. Surrender, and you will be shown clemency by the Church of the Whole.”
Sweat dripped down Anubis’s nose. Clemency? He hadn’t heard of any of that. “No, thank you. I came here to do a job.”
Fatum lunged, lumbering the final yards of distance towards him. Anubis backed up to the rubble and launched himself off it, leaping and aiming a fist at the Saint’s head. He felt the impact all the way up his arm, before Fatum batted him away, denting the armour on his chest.
There was a rip in Fatum’s helmet now, exposing a streak of pale skin to the air. Another wild swing blazed towards him, and he redirected the blow with his forearms. Seeing the Saint off-balance, Anubis stepped in close to drive an elbow and then a fist into the bullet wound he had left with the rail rifle and his sidearms. Fresh blood dribbled out, and Fatum groaned in pain.
The sound of it stopped him cold. The mechanical booming baritone of the synthesised voice was still there but flickering, and beneath it was something more agonised, higher pitched, almost child-like.
The kick caught him off guard. His shinbone snapped, and the white-hot pain blasted through his nervous system faster than his painkillers could keep up. Before he knew it, he was laying on his back, trying to get his senses back.
When his vision cleared, Saint Fatum’s blood was dripping onto his faceplate. The armoured giant towered above him, wheezing, holding its stomach. The fingers carried the wet, bloody hue of futility.
For a moment, that’s where they stayed. Fatum seemed to be trying to decide what to do with its fallen opponent, how to finish him off. It raised a boot to bring down onto his face, but stumbled and swayed. It tried to rebalance on two feet, but the swaying only increased.
Saint Fatum dropped to its knees. The snarl that broke forth from the distorted, infantile, crippled helmet was weak with anguish. “No. Not at your hand. Not in this... broken place.”
The ground trembled as the Saint crashed onto its side, then rolled onto its back. Anubis lay beside it, unable to move, staring at the broken helmet. The pale sliver of what had to be a cheek had become scarlet, flushed by the radiation that Williamson was soaked in.
“Here is as good a place as any, Saint Fatum. Wasn’t this colony the jewel of your church, outside of Earth?”
“Once.”
Anubis tried to push himself up. The stuttering CPU in his helmet told him that there was a micro-fracture in his chest armour, slowly being sealed. Radiation had leaked into his bloodstream, but not quite enough to kill him yet.
“Your orbiting vessel has been destroyed. Your drop pod is gone. Your spotter is dead.” Fatum’s head twitched towards him. “And you will die here with me. This is no victory.”
Anubis chuckled. “Maybe I will die here, zealot. Maybe I will. But it won’t be with you.”
He strained, and supported his weight on his good leg, before pushing himself up, leaning on the wall as he did so. The Saint groaned in pain again as he began to limp away. The sensors in his helmet found the signal tag in his rail rifle, but couldn’t assess any damage to it. He reloaded each pistol and re-holstered them.
“I could put you out of your misery, I suppose.” Anubis turned and limped back to the disabled Saint. “Would you prefer that to a slow death?”
“I will not beg you.”
“You don’t have to beg me. You would never have seen the rail slug coming. It would have been as if I were blowing out a candle. I can extend the same to you now. You have the right to die as painfully and slowly as you desire, but you don’t have to.”
The Saint said nothing for a moment. Anubis drew one pistol.
A distorted groan of pain echoed down the tunnel, then Fatum began to quietly pray. Anubis kept the gun levelled at it.
“I am the right arm of the Lord of the Whole. I am the sword arm of the Lord. I have fought heresy in life, and now I join the Whole in spirit. Now I rest. Now I am at peace.”
No synthesiser could hide the cracks in the tyrant’s composure. Anubis had no sympathy for it. He would have sympathy for a human being on the wrong side of a war, but not a biomechanical thing that had lost its humanity long ago.
“By the grace of the Whole... I give my life... I offer my life for the strength of those that remain... to battle the... to fight for victory... to...”
The words dissolved into sounds and noises that could have been a language, but not to Anubis’s ears. Fatum was gone in all but the twitching of its broken body.
Anubis waited until long after the Saint had fallen silent. His helmet sensors read the flatline of its lifesigns, but he kept the pistol pointed at its head for another five minutes before he finally lowered the weapon.
His mind spun as he limped towards the signal given off by his rail rifle. What was he going to do now, except hide and wait?
He could hear the drop ship engines buzzing above, sweeping back and forth to try and find him, or ensure he couldn’t leave the ruins. As he swept up the R9-47 and checked it for damage, it couldn’t escape him that he barely had enough rounds to pick off the aircraft. Stealth was his only option, and that was only the beginning of his problems. Supplies on Williamson would either be elusive or non-existent, outside of the meagre zealot forces.
He loaded a new round into his rifle, and prepared himself for a long, long wait for support. Support that may never come.
All he could do was survive for as long as he could. Day by day. Hour by hour. Anubis limped along the corridors towards the foundations of the fallen skyscraper. Underground, he would have a chance, beneath the rotting bones of Williamson Colony. Beneath the zealot leeches that sucked away what little was left.
Under the cover of the torn base of the ruined building, he spotted tears in the foundation that led beneath the surface. A dropship swept overhead, and Anubis slid backwards out of sight. Once it had passed out of sight, he limped towards the cracks as fast as he could. He dropped down into the largest of them, and began scanning for a place to set up camp.